Computer hangs on "Preparing to Hibernate"

as the hibernate utility came from compaq (hp) and i've checked with them again that i have the correct version and reinstalled it, but no change. i dont want to use the compaq restore disks as they completely wreck your system in that they reformat your drive and there is no option to do otherwise. this is why i installed from windows disks intead. and i'm glad i did my system is 100% better than it ever was when i did the compaq installation.

The hibernate driver is one piece of a puzzle. You'll need motherboard drivers as well. It's rare to find anyone get this right the first time or even know all the arcane drivers and registry settings that are needed. And you keep digging for driver after the motherboard item since any driver can cause the hang.

Bob

thanks for your reply
i reinstalled xp because of a few nasty problems i'd been having with lsass and SAM, basically i couldn't boot up and repair didn't work so i just reformatted, reinstalled and started all over again. the only difference being that instead of using the compaq quick recovery disks i just installed windows from scratch and rebuilt my system how i wanted it rather than the quick recovery way which gives you no options at all it just does everything automatically. obviously i was then missing a few compaq utilities which i downloaded from them and according to compaq (hp) i have everything i need, but still cant hibernate

Use the Compaq restore OS procedure. Very few can successfully install this OS from scratch. And ... it's not documented how to do that.

Bob

sorry, i just replied to your other post which i think explains where i'm coming from.

I never had any problems with hibernate before, it always worked flawlessly, at least for windows, until... I replaced my ide 120G IDE Maxtor with a 160G SATA Maxtor. I downloaded Maxblast to floppy, used it to copy everything onto the new SATA as the boot drive. After a few adventures with SATA drivers everything works fine, even my virtual drive utilities.

Everything that is except hibernate. It goes to sleep but no hibernate. It actually did hibernate once, then took a long time to wake up, other times it starts to hibernate then stops & goes to sleep.

After reading these posts it seems hibernate has caused problems before. I liked it because I often have 10-20 tabs open on Firefox & it brings them right back without reloading. Firefox has an extension that brings it back with everything it closed with, BUTTT, it takes a long time to load 15 tabs with a modem.

I'm wondering how serious are the problems that hibernate has caused. In other words how much trouble can I get into if I keep trying?

Thanks
Len

Check that you have this file on your C: drive, it's where windows puts hibernation info. It is a large file which will vary with the applications stored.

I read in another forum that hiberfil.sys is partially written to your page file. Also that it is not accessible for defragmenting in the normal way. It sounds like your file has become very fragmented. I use a program from Sysinternals called pagedefrag, which defragments the pagefile and registry prior to the welcome screen on boot.

I don't have hiberfil.sys on my disk. Neither windows or Copernic found it, though Copernic found a reference in Norton Ghost's PDF info folder. Since it has hibernated once I wonder about the importance of hiberfil. I'll keep checking.

Thanks
Z