Telling my laptop to hibernate either makes it restart or unable to boot windows on resume. HELP

I like to use hibernate because I typically keep a ton of stuff open all the time but it's like playing Russian roulette with my laptop because I can never know if it will work.

I'd say at least half the time when I tell it to hibernate it will either, for some reason, interpret the command as telling it to restart. Or it will go into hibernate mode but will fail to resume once I try to boot it up. I then have to "delete partition data" or whatever its called and boot normally (essentially restarting).

I don't really use sleep mode so I don't know if the problem occurs with that as well.

Perhaps one clue is that it happened in Vista, and thinking Windows 7 would be my savior in this regard, was very disappointed to find the problem persisting in Windows 7 as well, even after a complete reformat.

My stats are below. Any idea what could be causing this?

 

Obvious question first - have you updated to the latest drivers listed on Sager's website? ( http://74.212.252.103/pages/notebooks/download.cfm?ProductType=8662)

I would also suggest trying sleep mode, just to see if the issue occurs there, as well. Microsoft REALLY wants Sleep mode to be the suspend state of choice, so sometimes you will find better compatibility there than you will with hibernate.

 

thats a rather intimidating list of drivers... can you be more specific? i dont think an audio or video driver would have anything to do with it and i know i should avoid a bios update unless its really necessary to avoid bricking my system. i prefer hibernate over standby naturally because it uses far less battery life.

 

Avoid the BIOS update, but you would be surprised what can affect a system's suspend states. The first two I would recommend updating would be the Chipset and Video drivers. After that, the ethernet, wireless, and audio drivers are worth trying. If that still doesn't do the trick, you may still want to update the rest of the drivers.

 

just compared the dates, and the last time i updated all of those drivers was october-24 which is after the last time they updated them apart from the bios, so i should be up to date.

and i left my laptop idle, which sent it into sleep mode, and it just did the same thing as when i try to hibernate. I had to restart the machine.

 

Are you using a external mouse or keyboard? In the past we have seen where this was causing a system to restart when going into hibernation. If you have a external keyboard or mouse go to it in the device manager and un-select ""allow this device to wake the computer" under power management. As Eleison states above updating drivers is usually the first thing to try, then maybe bios.

 

I'm not sure what an internal mouse would look like but no I'm not using an external mouse or keyboard at this time I do have a bluetooth mouse I use but that's only when I'm gaming and I haven't in weeks.

All the drivers that I have installed are up to date, though some of those more obscure 'miscellaneous' drivers I haven't installed to begin with if it matters.

 

bump 10char

 

Since you mentioned that you have not installed some of the more obscure drivers - start there. EVERY component of the notebook has the ability to interfere with suspend states.

If those drivers updates don't help, as Justin said, the BIOS update is the next step to take.

 

I had a similar problem a while back with the 190 series nvidia drivers and downgrading back to 186.81 stopped all hibernate/sleep issues. Might be worth trying before a bios flash.

 

Just to pile on, don't assume, just because some component seems really trivial and not important to the functioning of your system, that the driver for the component cannot truly muck the entire system up. Almost all components, be they crucial or trivial, must support a sleep/hibernate power level in order for sleep/hibernate to work the way it's advertised (which brings up the point that you should also try removing any and all after-market components you may have installed, and doing a thorough uninstallation cleanup, because some of the more trivial aftermarket add-ons may not even be sleep/hibernate compliant). As a result, if a component supports a lower power level for sleep/hibernate purposes, it also needs a way for it to be "woken up" when the rest of the system comes out of sleep/hibernate - that means that the driver for each component has to have the means to catch a "wake" event and fire off the correct signal to the physical component to "wake" it up.

A failure in that part of even the most trivial component can hang the entire system, because a driver that is attempting to communicate with its hardware usually gets to execute at the highest level of priority, which means that it pre-empts almost everything else (including a lot of core OS stuff), which in turn means that it will hang the whole system if it fails to complete its task or fails to timeout waiting for a component that is not responding.

Finally, some components are supposed to be capable of waking the system up from hibernation/sleep - the mouse being the prototypical example. To do that requires that the component be set up to fire a particular signal off onto the main bus (or the new interconnect that Intel has replaced the bus with) to tell the rest of the system to initiate its "wake up" procedures. That presents a whole new category of places where a poorly designed or poorly coded component can literally gum everything up if it cannot properly trigger the system to wake up.

That last problem is also not limited just to peripheral components: if you go through some of the errata sheets for the various Intel chipsets (if you're really, really bored and really, really geeky, that is ), you'll come across a variety of sleep/hibernate-related errors in Intel's own chips - some of which they don't fix - that can make it impossible for a system to properly "wake up" from sleep and/or hibernation. Typically, if there is a workaround or a fix, it involves the firmware for that chipset, so you would be well-advised to not only do all of the driver updates, including the most esoteric or meaningless, but also do the BIOS update properly (follow the correct procedures, including, if it's there, doing the update to the KBC chipset firmware in the right order along with the BIOS update - doing them out-of-order can brick a system).

 

ok I'll tinker around a bit more with updating, but I need to emphasize that the problem is mostly with getting the thing to hibernate or stand by in the first place, not when trying to wake it up. I typically shut my lid to put it into hibernate, and then I'll hear the windows start up noise a few minutes later. Basically it restarts itself instead of even getting to the mode its supposed to (yes I've tried doing it by not shutting the lid), and sometimes I also have the problem when I try to wake it up.