PC won't hibernate

Hi

I'm trying to solve this on behalf of a friend who has just build himself a new PC. It's running Vista Ultimate and is an Intel with on of the new Wolfdale core processors, and DDR3 RAM.

He's tried everything to make it hibernate, but it just goes into hibernation, shuts down, then seconds later turns itself back on again. Hibernation is enabled, because it does do it, it just doesn't last more than a few seconds. It can't be the PC thinking it's coming out of a state of power loss, because the AC Power loss action is to remained powered off.

In event log he had a load of errors listed as "Windows has resumed from standby" and seems to say nothing about what is actually wrong.

Anybody got any ideas? Thanks.

Hi Moira, and a happy Easter to you and yours.

I am afraid I am not really the man to advise on hibernate, as I very rarely come across it, and then only on laptops.

I have a few suggestions that your friend might like to look into though:

1. As it is a new machine he has just built, then I would check that all the connections are firmly in place.

2. Power saving is generally handled by both the BIOS and the OS. I would check that there are no contradictory instructions.

3. Have a look at the wake up instructions. These might be mouse, keyboard, LAN or whatever. If it is on a network I would try disconnecting it, and seeing what it does in "stand alone" mode. Try setting just one wake up mode and cycling through them, to see if there is a particular culprit.

4. Disable any wireless devices and use PS/2 or USB cable connections. In my experience, wireless devices are prone to send "are you there?" messages every so often............... that could be the problem if the device is set to wake the PC?

5. On that note (although it would be bizarre) make sure that there are no other enabled wireless devices near the machine whilst it is being tested. Don't forget cell phones ;) It could be interference from a device you wouldn't normally suspect?

EDIT:

Quick question; are we talking about "standby" or "hibernate" here?

Howdy,

There are a few things here...

1. Did your friend check for BIOS updates when he built the new computer? It's something that people commonly forget to do, and it's commonly the cause of problems like this.

2. Check to see if the NIC is allowed to resume the computer. Nihil touched on this, but there are a couple of ways to do it.
--> Disable WOL (Wake-On-Lan) in the BIOS
--> Inside Windows --> Device Manager --> NIC --> Properties --> Power Management --> Ensure that the box "Allow this device to turn on the computer" is not checked.

3. Lastly, it could be due to a BIOS/OS "Resume on error" setting. You can check for any errors by running 'perfmon /rel'.

Yes, I recall this type of problem from pre-SP1 XP days. Now, back then it was problems with the BIOS and drivers for the various devices that would get shut down/restarted by the "sleep" or "standby" instruction.

Back then they were mostly driver issues, and I think that we may have a similar situation with Vista. If it isn't a relatively simple settings issue, then that is where I would be inclined to look next.

EDIT:

Having thought about it further, I would suggest looking at the Windows power options as well. You can select predefined schemes in Win2000 and XP at least. Don't know what would happen if this setting contradicted the BIOS settings?

I am still wondering about the "hibernate" though? as far as I am aware when you do that it stores what is in the memory to the HDD and then shuts the computer down. When you reboot, it takes you back to where you were?

"Standby" or "Sleep" justs put the peripherals into a standby state. When you activate a device with the appropriate authority it brings the computer back out of its "sleeping state"

Ya know, I had this issue with a new Dell XPS gaming system and it came down to the actual hard drive. Apparently, the drive didn't respond favorably to "resume". I dumped a Western Digital in there and it has been happy ever since. The original drive was a crapxtor.

Anyway, if you run through all the suggestions without luck, give this some thought as the possible cause.

--TH13

Interesting!

Quote:

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Apparently, the drive didn't respond favorably to "resume". I dumped a Western Digital in there and it has been happy ever since. The original drive was a crapxtor.

---

Sounds like a dud drive to me. If it were a firmware issue I would have expected to hear more about it........... and they should have detected it when testing the firmware?

I am always slightly suspicious with kit from the big brand names.......... I wonder how much is actually the component manufacturer's and how much is the OEM's. Certainly that is the case with BIOS these days............a lot of functionality seems to be missing :(

Many thanks for all the helpful suggestions! Though we still don't know exactly what caused it, resetting the BIOS by resetting the jumper leads on the motherboard seemed to solve the problem.

HTRegz wins!

He went for the BIOS solution 2/3 ;)

Hey, Hey, I will make a hardware tech out of you yet :D