Iomega Prestige HDD and Karmic

Just a little heads up. If you have an Iomega Prestige USB hard drive and you use suspend a lot and you are planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 or already have, there’s an annoying bug that makes the drive go in to an unresponsive state until power cycled. The symptoms include

• Takes a long time to actually suspend, waiting at a blank screen
• Drive doesn’t automatically power off like it should when it detects the computer has been suspended
• Drive is no longer visible to the system after resuming, even after unplugging it and plugging it back in
• Must be power cycled before it functions properly again

 

Here’s the bug report

Suspend!

Haha! After two years I finally got suspend to work on my Dell Inspiron 8200. Apparently the Nvidia binary driver causes a lot of problems with suspend.  But not in all cases.  I have another laptop (HP dv6500t) with a GeForce 8400 and suspend works fine without any tweaking.  Back to my Dell.  I found out that by adding

Option      “NvAGP”    “1″

to my xorg.conf and tweaking /etc/default/acpi-support as described here, made suspend work!  But I hit a little problem.  Adding the NvAGP option to xorg.conf killed my performance.  The entire desktop responsiveness went down the drain.  Then I found out the reason was because there was no AGP being loaded due to a conflict between the kernel’s AGP (AGPGART) and Nvidia’s AGP (NVAGP).  The solution I found was to blacklist the AGPGART module to prevent it from loading so NVAGP could load.  To do this I did

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

And added these two lines to the end of the list.

blacklist agpgart
blacklist intel_agp

Rebooted and the responsiveness of the system was back as well as being able to suspend and hibernate flawlessly.  Even the wireless works on resume!  You can always check the status of AGP with the Legacy Nvidia drivers with

cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status

And you should get something like

Status:             Enabled
Driver:              NVIDIA
AGP Rate:          4x
Fast Writes:      Disabled
SBA:                Disabled

The Driver will say either AGPGART or NVIDIA depending on what AGP you are using.

Now if I could just figure out how to use CPU frequency scalling with the Nvidia driver, I could report on a laptop that works 100% perfectly with Ubuntu.