Loss of hibernation functionality on Windows 7 Professional

Did you follow the tutuorial to try to interpret these yourself?

You may want to PM Cluberti to ask him to have a look. He runs MSFN and is very busy.

I did however when creating a summary file I got the error:

Boot action failed: Could not locate ExplorerReady event or mark.

It might just be me being thick, but I'm certainly trying.

JamesWhite said:

Hibernation had been working fine up until I upgraded my hard drive from a 160 GB 5400 RPM WD Elements Scorpio Blue to a 500 GB 7200 RPM WD Elements Scorpio Black hard drive. Ever since then I can't put my laptop into hibernation.

I wonder if the system image restore performed partition creation and format on your 500GB new drive to duplicate the arrangement you had on your old 160GB drive.

The system image you restored from includes descriptive partition information in it that reflects your original drive (or whatever additional drives are also in that system image, if there are any). Generally the process asks you if it should create/format partitions that are specified in the system image in order to duplicate the original system environment. You can't un-check system partitions that are mandatory (like your C-drive).

So maybe the new situation is an "image" or the old 160GB drive and you've run out of room and cannot allocate HIBERFIL.SYS now?

Have you run Partition Wizard Home Edition v5.2 or even the standard DISKMGMT.MSC in Win7 just to see what your new drive actually looks like? Do you really have all of the new 500GB? Or do you have a 160GB partition on that 500GB drive, and the remaining space is "unallocated"?

If you look at the drive contents (including system/hidden files, which you will need to alter your "view" properties of in order to actually show them in Explorer) do you see HIBERFIL.SYS on the drive?

When I imaged my new drive it did only use 160 GB of the hard drive, but I did go into Disk Management and extended the C:/ partition to use the 300 GB of unallocated space after the imaging was complete.

I have confirmed that the hiberfil.sys is on the root of the C:/ drive. I just used dir /a on an elevated command prompt.

So is hiberfil.sys there when you explore the partition with PW or Disk Mgmt as suggested?

Problem Solved!

I've just been into Disk Management and found that the C:/ partition was not labelled as an active partition. Clicking on "Mark Partition as Active" allowed me to hibernate my laptop once again!

This setting was not carried over from the re imaging process for some reason.

Ah well solves the mystery!

Thank you everyone for your input and guidance!

We'll have to remember to ask for Disk Mgmt screenshots in hibernation cases.

In fact, if you'll post it up now we'll make sure everything else is configured correctly. Use Snipping Tool in Start Menu.

Sure my partition setup is below, I'll briefly explain each of them to save confusion:

http://cid-2fdab2df16337b5b.office.l...partitions.PNG

C:/ - Windows 7
D:/ - Documents, personal files etc etc
2.01 GB Partition - Linux Swap Space
20.00 GB Partition - openSUSE /home/ partition
124.46 GB Partition - openSUSE

I didn't mention it before but I have dual boot configuration. Windows obviously cannot read the ext4 file system which openSUSE uses so the partitions are labelled as just primary, which is still correct.

JamesWhite said:

Problem Solved!

I've just been into Disk Management and found that the C:/ partition was not labelled as an active partition. Clicking on "Mark Partition as Active" allowed me to hibernate my laptop once again!

This setting was not carried over from the re imaging process for some reason.

I'm still a little puzzled. It would help us all if we could see a screenshot of either DISKMSGMT.MSC presenting your hard drive structure, or Partition Wizard's presentation. Either would be very helpful.

My confusion is that I wouldn't have expected your C-partition (which is where, I assume, your Win7 is located) to actually be the "active" partition. On a 1-OS environment, Win7's installer would create the 100MB "system reserved" partition, which is actually the "active" partition" but shows up as un-lettered from the perspective of booted Win7.

The actual Win7 partition itself (which really is C to all of us) is a "system" folder (and also a "primary" partition instead of a "logical" partition) is NOT marked as the "active" partition.

The "active" partition is what the BIOS boots to. And it is that 100MB "system reserved" partition where Win7's boot manager files are located. Once initiated, they then examine the list of possibly multiple installed OS's to then really boot to.

If only one is present (i.e. your single installed Win7) then boot manager just goes there immediately and you never even hear about it, or even knew that the BIOS went to "system reserved" (i.e. "active partition") first.

If multiple OS's are possible, boot manager presents that list to you and asks you to choose which one you really want to boot to.

But your "C" partition would normally NOT be the "active" partition, unless you had a multiple-OS environment (e.g. WinXP on one partition and Win7 on a second partition). In that case, the original bootable (and "active" WinXP partition) would be where the Win7 install would substitute its own boot manager (replacing the previously existing WinXP boot manager) and construct a 2-OS boot menu for you to choose from at boot time.

In this case, that old WinXP boot partition would be marked as "active" and the BIOS would boot there, and then Win7's boot manager would take over. And you would NOT end up with a 100MB "system reserved" partition, because it wasn't needed.


So, again... I'm at least a bit puzzled. If you're in a 1-OS (WIN7 only) situation, I would have expected you to have a 100MB "system reserved" partition which was the one marked as "active". The true Win7 partition (which will be C to Win7, after the boot process finally completes) is a "primary" partition and has a status of "system", but it's not "active"... at least not normally.

Now for sure, if you now have two drives, then the BIOS of the machine should have been changed by you to point to the new large 500GB drive as "hard disk #1" and make it the "boot drive". But it would/should have been that very important 100MB "system reserved" partition on that new 500GB drive which should have been marked as "active".

Did you change your BIOS settings to point to the new drive as #1?

Again, can you provide a screenshot from DISKMGMT.MSC or Partition Wizard?


(EDIT: well naturally, as I was composing my reply you were typing your most recent reply. You do have a multi-OS situation, which would clearly complicate things to the extent that your setting the Win7 partition as "active" (i.e. "bootable") resolved your situation.)