Hibernated my work XP laptop when I left the office as usual this afternoon then restarted when I got on the train. Got the black screen 'restoring windows' or whatever it says with the progress bar at the bottom. Then it went to the blank blue screen also as per usual, which normally precedes the login prompt. But the prompt didn't appear.
It just stayed on the blank blue screen - ctrl-alt-del didn't do anything. The HD activity light kept flickering at the sort of rate when nothing in particular is happening.
Eventually I closed the lid, which should make it hibernate. After a few minutes I opened it again - not 100% sure but I think it was already on the blank blue screen, as if it hadn't re-hibernated (sort of as expected).
So I held down the power button to force a power down (without hibernate). Thus when I turned it on again it did a 'normal' Windows power up. I looked in the root directory and could see the hiberfil.sys (~3.5Gb).
My main concern is that I do virtually all my work in a VMWare linux virtual machine, and I was worried that I might have lost some of my work because the VM disk image hadn't been written to disk (if that makes sense). But I think it's ok, or at least I haven't lost anything vital.
My question is - if this (not coming out of hibernate) happens again, is there anything I can do? For example, after holding down the power button to force a power down, can I manually force the machine to attempt to come out of hibernate again using the hiberfil.sys rather than do a normal Windows start up?
BTW I use hibernate because when running VMware the laptop is a lot quicker to shut down. If I close the VM and do a normal shut down, there's a good few minutes of continuous disk activity before it turns off. Hibernate just takes about 20 seconds.
Last edited by: Focus on Wed 23 Feb 11 at 20:17
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Hibernating the PC by closing the lid, is never a 100% guaranteed action.
If you have a running process that refuses to stop when told to, your hibernation image (as you say - the hiberfil.sys file) will be corrupt.
If you want to hibernate do it with a key stroke so you can see the machine shut down.
edit, chances are it never properly hibernated, and opening and closing the lid afterwards just makes it worse.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 23 Feb 11 at 20:25
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>> Hibernating the PC by closing the lid, is never a 100% guaranteed action.
Ok - I've seen it refuse previously when attempting a start/shut-down hibernate (complained about the wifi card IIRC).
>> If you have a running process that refuses to stop when told to, your hibernation
>> image (as you say - the hiberfil.sys file) will be corrupt.
But doesn't it just refuse to hibernate? That's what happened previously.
>> If you want to hibernate do it with a key stroke so you can see
>> the machine shut down.
Sounds sensible anyway, ta.
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>> But doesn't it just refuse to hibernate? That's what happened previously.
Sometimes if a process is hung, it can get hybernated. Sometimes the process comes back hung, sometimes the tree is corrupt.
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I use VMWARE and I suspend the VMs before I hibernate the laptop. I wouldn't want to lose work. Suspending a VM is pretty quick on my laptop though.
I also make sure the machine is shutting down before it goes in the laptop rucksack - I've got home once and found it (a) still on and (b) therefore very very hot.
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and then the battery goes very very flat.
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But not totally flat if the journey from office to home is less than a few hours.
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>> Suspending a VM is pretty quick on my laptop though.
SSD HD?
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Just a normal 7200rpm hard disk. I think the process got quicker when I upgraded it to 8Gb RAM though, i.e. none of the VMs memory is swapped to disk.
What does take a while is resuming the laptop from hibernate due to the total disk encryption. At least in Windows 7 the hibernate file can be made smaller than main memory.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Wed 23 Feb 11 at 21:46
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The actual suspension is quite quick. It's a minute or 2 after that, or when I shut down, that the disk goes into overdrive for a few minutes, as if it's perhaps writing cache to disk. But that takes a lot longer than a hibernate, which AFAIK involves writing 3.5Gb to disk.
Looking at Task Manager, PF Usage is running at about 1GB with VMware currently running.
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>> It's a minute or 2 after that, or when
>> I shut down, that the disk goes into overdrive for a few minutes
...and while it's doing that, trying to do anything else is like stirring treacle.
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Best to shut down unless it is less than a few minutes.
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The saving in time is when you start it all back up again though.
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>> Buy a Mac.
>>
With fries, and a shake.
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>> Buy a Mac.
And what do you reckon the chances are of claiming that back on expenses? :)
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why would a raincoat help?
sometimes you guys just bewilder me.................
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...Buy a Mac...
That's my line.
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>> ...Buy a Mac...
>>
Its not raining today.
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>> The saving in time is when you start it all back up again though.
Not for me it isn't - it's the normal shut down time which is a PITA (when using VMware).
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GEt a new laptop from work. Suspending about 6 VMs running various operating sytems (part of a VM team) takes a few minutes. Then the laptop is suspended.
I don't use VMWARE every day though - I have access to test and other environments on this project. I find clusters easier outside of VMWARE.
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>> GEt a new laptop from work.
Only got current one (Dell Vostro 1220) last year, so no chance! It's just an inconvenience.
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>>Best to shut down unless it is less than a few minutes.>>
I use Hibernate throughout the day, but always ensure that I Shut Down my desktop at the end of the day.
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>> The actual suspension is quite quick. It's a minute or 2 after that, or when
>> I shut down, that the disk goes into overdrive for a few minutes, as if
>> it's perhaps writing cache to disk. But that takes a lot longer than a hibernate,
>> which AFAIK involves writing 3.5Gb to disk.
Thinking about it, I guess its the .vmdk file which is being updated (un-cached?) - that's the file which represents the linux file system. In my case, it's ~40GB.
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Hibernate fail - Zero
