Hibernation/Suspend Problems on X2* Thinkpads (maybe others)

[graywolf]

(Note to moderators: I am posting this here because I think it may apply to other models as well. If you feel that is wrong you are welcome to move it to where ever you deem appropriate.)


My X24 suddenly would not go into hibernation. The Hibernation Tab was not available in the Power Management applet, and any attempt to turn hibernation back on, such as "powercfg -h on" resulted in a message "System does not support hibernation".

After searching the web, mucking around in the registry, and finally wiping the hard drive and doing a new install of Windows XP Professional with SP3 slipstreamed into it. I still did not have hibernation, nor suspend, as an option.

Looking through Lenovo's website I saw there was a newish version (2007) of the power management package available. After loading it Hibernation and Standby (I thought was called Suspend in the old package) were again available.

My conclusion was that on these older Thinkpads the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is not firmware in the BIOS, but purely a software driver and thus subject to to corruption. So if you run into such a problem download the latest power management driver from Lenovo for your system and install it.

A note, reinstalling the old driver onto the running system did not fix the problem, but I (stupidly) did not try it from safe mode.

Hoping you never find this post useful,

Tom

[cdero]

ad expericed this issue with R51 and T43 and concluded that you must back rev the WIFI card driver. I performed every tweek/modification under the sun and after a few months of testing the issue was resolved. I needed to have this test flawlessly as I needed to deploy the fix out to 400 HS students that had the most recent versio nof the WIFI driver as of Sept 07.

[graywolf]

I just reinstalled everything on a 60gb drive upgrade and found out some new things about this. I posted a short article in the X2* forum.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=63388

The gist of it is that XP Pro has most of the drivers already. The Power Management driver is the critical one. You need to install it for Standby and Hibernate to work. The Display driver is helpful. I imagine this is interesting to those who do not want all those Think utilities on their computer, or do not have the R&R CD's.

[graywolf]

Well, the problem is back after a clean install of XPP-SP3 and 22 pieces of software. At this point I suspect that one of the programs shut off hibernation and standby. There is a lot of stuff about this problem with thinkpads on the web, only none I have read gives a valid solution (other than a wipe and clean install).

Strangely I never had this problem before, and I am wondering if the problem has something to do with SP3? An over install, and reinstalling the TPM driver does not fix it.

The only thing I did between working and not working this time was try and upgrade to an a/b/g Xjack wifi card from my a/b one, but it turned out to be DOA (used from ebay). I thought that the driver may have turned on wake on lan, but that is supposed to bring the Thinkpad out of hibernation not disable it, so concluded that was not the problem.

Over on Ars Technica I have a somewhat long thread about this problem from the last time it happened including registry lists, etc. But got little help with it.

So I am going back to SP2 as soon as I get a round to it and see if that fixes it perminently.

Stay tuned!

[graywolf]

OK, I removed all the last software packages that required a reboot (registry changes) and this morning hibernation is back. Now to reload the software one package at a time until the problem comes back.

[graywolf]

Final post.

It turned out to be a conflict between an old piece of software (pre-XP), SP3, and the Thinkpad Power Management Drivers. The specific software in this case was Music Time Deluxe. Finding that out was a matter of removing all the last several software packages then reloading them one at a time, rebooting after each package, and checking Power Options in Control Panel to see if the Hibernation Tab was still there.

You would think music notation software would be as innocuous as anything you could imagine. Just goes to show you never can tell.