> Hi, I've been trying to get NetBSD 3.1 up and running on an old Dell Latitude 
> XPi (Pentium 90, 8 MB).  The problem is suspending the machine and resuming 
> freezes the computer completely, and when I force a reboot, I find the install 
> has been completely trashed, only sometimes recoverable by fsck.  Any ideas 
> why this is happening?  I suppose I could just not use suspend.  But seeing 
> that the laptop dose it every time I close the lid, I wouldn't be able to take 
> it anywhere without shutting down first...

> Thanks for any suggestions,
> -Jesse Wilson

Peter Seebach responded:

> Huh!  Oddly, a friend of mine had a somewhat newer than that Dell system
> where, unpredictably, the entire FS would be trashed, sometimes including
> the partition table.  We never did figure that out.

> One possibility is that the machine expects some specific chunk of disk space
> to be available for storing the contents of memory when it's suspending; it
> might be worth setting up the "normal" Windows system on it, and looking to
> see what the disk partitions look like.

> BTW, there is no NetBSD 3.1.  You may be thinking of FreeBSD or something?

NetBSD is only up to 1.6, but FreeBSD is up to 4.7, however OpenBSD is at 3.1.
There is a newsgroup comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc, much more active than
comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc when I last looked, and emailing lists that can be
found by browsing http://www.openbsd.org/ (assuming the problem is with
OpenBSD 3.1).