Hibernate and Media Centres

[Who]

Hi all,

I am wondering about the possibility of using a specially set up case
of the hibernate feature to allow a 'quick boot' (not quite 'instant
on', as I read thawing takes 40 seconds...) mode for a home theatre
PC.

A limited understanding of the hibernate process has led me to believe
the following could potentially be possible:

Let (or help) the user set up a minimal session with _just_ what was
needed for a media centre running/in memory, then 'hibernate' that
session to a flash disk, partition or even perhaps a CD. 'Separate'
(in the eyses of the bootloader) this image from the main OS - so that
every time the computer was restarted a user could either choose to
reload the saved minimal session (I.E thaw it, allowing booting very
quickly) or boot normally into their full OS.

If these two boot methods showed up as two distinct options in GRUB
then it would be possible to have one set up as the default on the MBR
and the other set up as the default on a floppy disk - effectively
giving the user a hardware switch to change which they booted into (I
switched between Breezy/Dapper like this throughout the development
cycle and really liked it)

Would there be any difference between the speed of thawing from disk
and from a flash disk?

Is it likely to be implementable, if not, what are my misconceptions?
If so, does anyone else think it would be worth doing?

Thanks in advance for any replies,

Who