Hmmm... has anyone tried putting the genuine suspend partition in a place where the bios will find it first?

If the bios uses short circuit evaluation of their internal search loop, then maybe it will find this one first, see it in the expected state, and either restore it or boot normally as necessary without getting confused by the later overly large FreeBSD partitions with the same ID. The Bios is bound to searche either first to last, or last to first. Heck, put two suspend partition in, one first, one last, and tuck the freeBSD partition in between. Worth a try anyway.

I know nothing about FreeBSD, but I suspect it is like linux systems in that while it would think the suspend partition is a FreeBSD partition, it will only mount it or mess with it if you tell it to (manually or by /etc/fstab), so there should be no problem. The bios does all the suspend to disk stuff, so as long as they always discover the correct partition in the right order and always use short circuit evaluation, then it may work.

Just a thought. If IBM wants to send me a brand new Thinkpad, I will be most happy to try it out :). My Sharp Actius laptop uses partition type a0 for hibernation, and the Linux fdisk tool calls it a "IBM Thinkpad hibernation" partition.

Bill