XP halts at "Preparing to hibernate"

I did a clean install 3 days ago and everything has been running well so far.

However, when I tried to hibernate the system, it just halted at the above stage and I had to press the power button tightly to get the system to power off.

Previously hibernation had worked well. Do you guys have any clue to this?

Hung

 

I am facing the same problem too, on my XP laptop which was working fine. I recently tried using the TuneXP utlity to speedup the booting and shutdown. Not sure if that might have have caused the problem.

 

Have you updated all your drivers? Sometimes a bad chipset or video driver can cause hibernation problems.

 

This happens to me time to time (one in every 20 or so as a wild guess), but hardly ever in the first few months after a clean install. Does this happen every time?

Another similar problem I have is XP hanging when resuming from hibernation (or taking a very long time, long enough that I'd rather restart).

Doesn't happen enough to make me do something about it but I'd also be grateful if someone has a solution.

 

It sounds like the hibernate file may have been corrupted, which sometimes happens. You can reset the file by unchecking the Enable Hibernation option in the System tab of Control Panel, shut down and reboot, and then re-enable the option. If that doesn't work, I think you might also be able to delete the system file (hiberfil.sys, I think) and then restart - XP should initialize a new one on reboot.

As for TuneXP altering boot and shutdown speeds:
1. if you run the ultra-boot tweak you have to let it totally complete the defrag in order for it to work (if you don't, bootup can be drastically slowed).

2. the shutdown tweak just disables a couple of XP processes that otherwise are activated during shutdown, it does nothing involving Hibernate.

 

This may not be the same issue, but check to see if you've installed the hotfix for KB909095. XP SP2 has problems hibernating sometimes on systems with 2GB of ram.

 

The majority of the time, hibernation problems are caused by bad drivers or third-party applications which install driver-level components into the system.

After reinstalling, you must have all the proper drivers installed in order to properly hibernate (there are a few exceptions to this, ex: my TPM driver is not installed and it still works ).

Also, some types of programs which install their own drivers into the system like firewalls can also cause hibernation to stall out. I had an old version of Kerio PFW crashes on the preparing to hibernate screen on another PC

Utility programs that install drivers may also be suspect. ex: I've had ATITray make the screen just completely go blank when I try to hibernate.

As for the KB909095 issue, that gives an "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API" error and prevents you from hiberating and drops you back to the desktop. Used to get that. Never crashed my PC, but it was really annoying...