Hibernation bug changes BIOS

[mintamico]

There is a hibernation bug in LM 17 MATE 64 bit which causes a black frozen screen after a while when the desktop is locked through non-use. I don't know how long the time span is until the problem occurs - I had it twice during overnight disk utility sessions. The bug causes a black screen with no response by mouse click, mouse movement or keyboard.

I found many reports about that bug or a similar bug in different forums concerning laptop computers. But my computer is a desktop PC.

People also report that the frozen screen cannot be changed and only a hard shut down is the only solution. They can start the laptop without problems.

But I experienced another problem: the bug changed the BIOS of my computer with the effect that the GRUB menu would not appear. I also got an error message of the BIOS concerning "express gate", an unusual sequence of splash screens of the BIOS and lastly the cursor blinking in the top left corner.

In BIOS I found out that the bug changed the sequence of hard drives (and probably the boot sequence - I'm not sure about that.) With the effect that the wrong hard drive was chosen for start up which has no GRUB on it. I changed the sequence of hard drives so that the hard drive with GRUB on it comes first. The "express gate" error I got rid of by flashing the BIOS with a DVD. So everything is fine now.

My computer:
LM 17 MATE 64 bit
3.13.0-24-generic
MATE 1.8.1
ASUS P5Q-VM motherboard


My question:
Is there an easy way to repair the hibernation bug?
And if not, is there a non-risky way of turning off hibernation so that this problem would not appear again?

[Pjotr]

Turn hibernation off like this:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinux ... d-to-disk-
(item 2.5, right column)

Please consider supporting this improvement idea of mine:
http://community.linuxmint.com/idea/view/5482

[mintamico]

Yes, it's a good idea to disable hibernation by default.

The first time this freeze occured several weeks ago I went into big trouble because I thought that my hard-drive with HOME on it caused the freeze. The hard drive apparently had a lot of damaged blocks. I couldn't even boot from CD or DVD with the screen turning off (!) by itself (!). Only when I unplugged the hard drive I could boot from live DVD. I changed the hard drive, copied all my HOME data, changed GRUB etc. etc. and still it wasn't working because of the BIOS change...

I hope that my advice to look into BIOS and check the sequence of hard drives and boot sequence will save other people much trouble.