How to restore Hibernation after memory upgrade

[Derek Harvey]

Hi,
XP Home. Shut down, upgraded memory from 2x512M to 2x1G, i.e., now 2Gb.
Started up, system works fine.
Go to Hibernate (Shift + Standby), goes to Preparing, hickups twice and goes
back to previous desktop display. Hibernate tab gone from Power options and
now no Shift + Standby.
After a shut down and startup, Hibernate is apparently back, but again fails
in the same way.

I hear it may be neccesary to delete hiberfil.sys but cannot find this file.
Where should it be? Is this likely to be the solution?

Derek

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Turn off Hibernation, restart Windows, and turn Hibernation on again.

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..

 

[Anteaus]

Also bear in-mind that hibernating will now use somewhat in excess of 2GB
disk space, and will take longer. If that space isn't available, no hibernate
otpion.

 

[Derek Harvey]

Thanks Mark. Yes, that seems to have worked. I needed a restart first so I
could get it back to turn it off!

I assume restarting with it turned off deletes the hiberfil.sys in its old
size, so that Windows will make a new one with the larger size next time.
Seems a particularly stupid piece of implementation.

This solution ought to be in the Knowledge Base. I did try and search for
Hibernation problems and found various esoteric discussions of bad drivers,
incapable BIOSs and other red herrings, but not this simple, but surely
quite common, problem and very simple solution.

Thanks again.
Derek

 

[Derek Harvey]

Correction! My optimism expressed in earlier reply was premature.
After one successful Hibernate and Restore (when not much was going on in
the machine) a second attempt when there were open (but idle) programs
failed with the previous results, i.e., failure to do the Hibernation after
saying 'preparing' and removal of the Hibernate tab in Power Options.

There is over 10Gb free space reported for drive C. This should be enough?
(at one point Windows did say it needed 2G and 10G were available).

If that is likely to be the problem, is there any way of moving the
Hibernate file to another drive. I have two other partitions with oodles of
space.

Alternatively I suppose I could try re-partitioning to get more free space
for C.
TIA for any further thoughts and advice. Would there be a trace somewhere of
why it failed? (It may be pertinent that one of the things running at the
time of failure was CodeGear RadStudio, a very large thing; it takes several
minutes to load up which is one reason why I like to hibernate when I am
using it.)

Derek

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

I would say the problem is the virtual memory 'page file' (and, of course,
it's size in relation to the hiberfile size, and available hard drive
storage space).. It's possible that moving that page file to another drive
could help.
This site will help you understand the basics of that.
Virtual Memory in Windows XP: http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php
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[Derek Harvey]

I looked at some statistics in Process Explorer and Task Manager:
RAM 2096K
Available 1382K, Sys Cache 1512K (these add to more than 2G)
Paged physical 159K, Paged virtual 166K
Paged limit 'no symbols'
Non-paged 40K
PF in use 781Mb
Commit charge 806K, Limit 3516K, Peak 946K (what is this?)
(Free space on C is >10G.)
Can you deduce any more from this than the little I can?
I have now removed one of the two 1G RAMs and will see how it goes with just
the 1G (there were two 512M RAMs before). Then I will try just the other 1G.

Derek

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Looking back over this, I realize I failed to answer one of your questions.
The 'hiberfil.sys' file in a hidden file in the root of C: (%systemdrive%)
Looks like you should try some of the KB articles.
The computer occasionally does not hibernate and you receive an Insufficient
System Resources Exist to Complete the API:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909095/en-us
330909 - Hibernation Problem on Computers with 1 GB of RAM:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q330909

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[Derek Harvey]

Thanks Mark, it looks like my problem although I DO NOT see any error
message although there is a beep. I have dowloaded the hotfix and hope that
will cure it.
The article, like many others in the KB, seems rather old fashioned - 1G is
hardly 'lots of RAM' these days!?
I did do a search of Knowledge Base before raising the question here but I
don't think it led me to that one.
By the way, I would like to cast a vote but don't see how to do it from
Outlook Express.
It may take a while to test this out among other work but I'll let the group
know in due course.

Derek

 

[Derek Harvey]

Having installed K909095 (cople of glitches, one during the install and
another during the restart but seems OK now) I have had no further problems
with hibernating with 2Gb RAM restored. Possibly concidentally I do now have
16G free on C, from 10G before.

Thanks again for your help, Mark.
Derek