T42 very slow in going into hibernation

[fschwep]

My T42 2373 suddenly developed a hibernation quirk. When I press Fn-F12 it takes ages to go into hibernation (i.e. about 10 full minutes to write the contents of RAM to the hibernation file). I have 1 GB of RAM and close as many apps as I can before hibernating the machine. It happens both when docked to the minidock and when not docked. I figured clearing out some ballast from the harddrive and defragging might solve it, but no show. I'm now considering switching off the hibernation option in BIOS completely as the hiberfile takes up a full gig on the harddrive, and with a 10-minute wait it is no use at all.
It does wake up normally from hibernation once it has gone to sleep, though.
Has anyone had this weird problem?

[EOMtp]

It may be that the disk has developed bad spots in the area preallocated to the hibernation file. If so, depending on the number of retries it takes ot write the large file, the full process could take as long as you state.

See if there is unabated disk activity during all that time that it takes to complete the hibernation process. If so, use whatever utilities you have/like to check the health of the disk drive.

[FTC]

Hi,

Yes, it could be very well what Eomtp said. If this is the case, you need to :

1. Disable hibernation (will erase hibernation file). Done from control panel->power options->hibernate tab. Go to 2) immediately now.. because you may have at this time bad spots maked as 'usable' free space.

2. Scan the disk for errors checking "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors". Do this from my computer->Your hdd->properties->tools. This will require a reboot of the system and can take some time, but after that any developed bad sector will be marked as a bad spot and not reused by windows.

3. Reenable hibernation

[fschwep]

Thanks guys, I was afraid it might be something like that; I'm running a HD check on it right now, while continuing to work and discuss here using my recently acquired pre-owned (eBay) X30. By the looks of it, the process is running slowly, which might be a bad sign.
Maybe I'll forget about the hibernation thing anyway, as it does eat a full GB of my harddisk space, which is rather limited due to the plethora of applications that is running and all the data stored on my T42 (I have also kept the RR hidden partition, so the C: partition starts at about 34 GB instead of almost 40).

[FTC]

Hi,

If the problem persists after scanning for errors and the slowliness is *general*, i.e not only when hibernating, then make sure your disk has not degraded to PIO mode... you can see that in device manager. To fix this, you'll have to ununstall your IDE/ATAPI controllers and let the system reinstall them after a reboot...

[fschwep]

FTC, Thanks for the tip. Slowness does persist, albeit less extreme, after checkdisk (which found no errors) and a thorough defragging. If the problem remains and is limited to hibernation mode, I will just give up on that and limit myself to either suspend or switching off and reboot.

[fschwep]

Update: it uses UltraDMA for the harddrive. No problem there. I'm just going to get rid of sleep mode and use the gigabyte of disk space for something more useful.

[lalf]

Might be worth trying BootVis from Microsoft
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Syst ... tVis.shtml

BootVis is a performance trace visualization tool for use with Windows XP systems. Customer research shows a frequently requested feature that users want from their PCs is fast system startup, whether from cold boot or when resuming from standby or hibernation.

The Windows development team at Microsoft has taken bold steps in making fast startup PCs a reality with the Microsoft Windows XP operating system.

Features:

· Boot to a useable state in a total of 30 seconds
· Resume from Hibernate (S4) in a total of 20 seconds
· Resume from Standby (S3) in a total of 5 seconds