Patent ID: 7162629

Claim:
A method for resuming a computing device, comprising: determining whether a selected operational environment is in a resume stack; if the selected operational environment is in the resume stack, then popping an entry of the resume stack, the entry identifying a location of a resume file; invoking the selected operational environment using the resume file; and booting the selected operational environment if the selected operational environment was not in the resume stack, wherein the resume stack identifies a plurality of disparate operational environments, wherein each operational environment has a corresponding disk partition, the corresponding disk partition having an operational environment loader, wherein the resume file resides in a disk partition identified by a globally unique identifier (GUID) in a partition table, the disk partition corresponding to one of a plurality of operational environments to be run on the computing device, and wherein the computing device is configured with an extensible firmware interface (EFI) architecture to define the plurality of disk partitions havina corresponding operational environments.