I have an Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook. It comes with two separate drives, one 320 gb hdd and a 20 gb ssd, which Windows uses for hibernation. I formatted the SSD and installed Ubuntu on it.
How do I format the SSD so that Windows recognizes the SSD as the hibernation drive, like the way it came out of the box?
Acer really had an interesting way of using the SSD. I'm just trying to get the laptop ready to sell, so I figured I would get it back to normal.
Minor correction to the above. The SSD in the S3 is used for Intel Rapid Start Technology, not Smart Response. iRST is enabled/disabled in BIOS. If you deleted the partition, you can recreate it using the instructions in the IRST user guide. The guide contains some good general reading about the technology, too. For those wishing to use part of the SSD for Linux, the guide states the hibernation partition must only be the same size or larger than main memory. It should, therefore, be possible to use the majority of the SSD for a Linux installation.
As far as I am aware, the hibernation file by default is always on the system drive.
My guess is that this 20GB SSD was simply the system drive and it booted from the main hard drive - or, something funky is going on with Intel RST technology and it was being utilized this way.
For Intel RST, I haven't had a chance to look at this technology yet :( I believe you set it in the BIOS/Raid setup or from the Intel Rapid Storage Technology program inside of Windows.
However, if you are selling this laptop, I think you are best off simply using the recovery disks - this will give the end use the out of box experience and everything else as if they had just purchased the machine.
The windows hibernation file "hiberfil.sys" resides at the top directory where your OS is installed, Ideally "C:\hiberfil.sys". This file is as big as your RAM is.
The file systems that windows use are FAT and NTFS. File system of linux is ideally EXT 4. By Default, windows is not capable enough to read the linux file system, however this article might help.
I am still not sure that even if your windows will be able to read your linux file system, will it actuall be able to utilize another kind of file system for hibernation, and other system specific tasks.
Please remember that windows is never comfortable in handling hiberfile.sys, pagefile.sys if present outside the parent directory of the OS; if it is possible at all!
That drive was used by the Intel Smart Response Technology as I just found out myself.
And I believe that it is just a raw (unpartitioned, no file system) drive which should be set in the Intel's driver to be used. Something like this guide explains.
EDIT:
After some more digging, it turns out that Acer Aspire S3's chipset (UM67 Express) doesn't have the SRT capability, and that SSD is used only for waiking from sleep and hibernation. A god damned huge hibernation partition if you ask me. It looks like marketing means more to Acer than happy users.
Even though the chipset isn't RAID, if you create a partition with ID=b8cb5058-c187-4719-baf0-379ca2d4c97e Intel Rapid Response will install onto it. I don't believe acceleration will not be available until the driver loads, unlike the RAID version which has BIOS support.
