Hello,
I succefully dualbooted 2 windows 7 installs on seperate partitions on the same physical drive.
I was wondering if it's possible to hibernate one of them while still being able to boot into the second one.
--Thanks in advance, Cyragia
Unfortunately, I do not believe that is possible.
Please try it and let us know what happens:
Boot into one OS and Hibernate it. If necessary turn Hibernate on: Hibernate - Enable or Disable - Windows 7 Forums
Now press the Power button and from what I remember it will only Resume with no choice of OS, but it's possible that it will let you choose the OS since Hibernate I believe is the same as fully shut down with no power.
Last edited by gregrocker; 15 Jul 2013 at 09:32.
I doubt this is possible. One thing is certain though, it should never be done. I will explain.
When you do a hibernation the system copies the contents of RAM to the hiberfil.sys file. This file and the other files in the partition form a snapshot of the state of the system when it went into hibernation. This allows the system to resume to the exact same state on a resume from hibernation. Now assume you hibernate partition 1 and then boot into partition 2. If at any time any files in partition 1 are altered (even if in a very small way) the snapshot of it's state becomes invalid. The contents of the system cache, the state of open files, etc (all of which is in the hiberfil.sys file) is out of sync with the files in the partition. Resuming from hibernation in partition 1 could have disastrous consequences. The OS in partition 1 essentially becomes corrupt, along with any files it may be accessing in any partition. The results of this are unpredictable. It could mean a system or application failure, a BSOD, data loss or corruption, etc. There is no recovery from this situation.
Windows designers are no doubt aware of this problem and have taken steps that it does not happen. If there is a valid hiberfil.sys file in any partition it will automatically boot to that OS with no other choices offered. This is for your own protection.
Edit: It makes no difference if the partitions are on different drives. Any modification of a hibernated drive or partition by any means is potentially disastrous.
Your question is more or less answered so I must ask, why not just go with a virtual machine? Its really the only option for running multiple OS at a time.
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