My company issued laptop is Dell Latitude E7450 running Windows 7 Professional. If I hibernate the system, on boot it displays a blank screen and does not respond to input. Subsequent reboots do not yield different results. My IT department tells me that Windows hibernation is problematic on Dells, and that hibernating destroys the boot partition. They rebuilt the boot-loader, and told me to be very careful not to let the system hibernate again.
I am a software engineer, not a system administrator, but something about this doesn't sound right to me.
Is my IT department right? Is it a common problem that users brick their systems through hibernation? Or is it something about the image they have created? Interaction with UEFI? Is there a solution?
Best Answer
Nope, it's definitely not trashing the bootloader since hibernation never touches the bootloader with a write. It doesn't have to, since all that's required to boot from a hibernation image is for that image to be present at all. It's always checked for during boot.
It's failing to restore from hibernation, and keeps trying to restore every time it boots. This is usually due to a driver issue, and likely can be fixed by making sure all of your drivers are installed and at their latest versions (or at least not ancient versions).
One easy way to get around this is to delete c:\hiberfile.sys from the drive (obviously with some live OS, or with the OS drive connected to another working machine). With that file gone, it will no longer try to restore that image to RAM and will continue with its normal boot process. The thing to do here would be to disable hibernation on this laptop entirely, or fix the underlying device reset / driver issue.