GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

Playing with Vista a little more this evening, and I clear some disk space to do some shrinking and expanding of partitions. The "Disk Cleanup" tool has a tempting 1.5GB that I can release by disabling Hibernate - which I've done, simply to free up a little space temporarily.

Okay, now that I've done the thing that used all that space, I want to re-add Hibernation as an option. Disk Cleanup of course isn't offering this any more, because I've already reclaimed the space. Power options aren't giving me the ability to re-enable Hibernate, either. I'm going nuts trying to find this, and the help file is no help.

 The KB is the only place to offer a ray of sunshine, with article KB 920730, "How to disable and renable hibernation on a computer that is running Windows Vista".

The secret is to open a command prompt as Administrator (why can't I right-click on that Command Prompt shortcut in my Start bar and Run As Administrator from there?), and then issue the command "powercfg -hibernate on" ("powercfg -h on" will work as well).

Of course, if you don't open the command prompt as Administrator, it won't actually prompt for elevation, it'll simply tell you "You do not have permission to enable or disable the Hibernate feature."

It's little things like this that suggest a lack of completeness on this OS - not just that the GUI doesn't exist, but that you have to open an elevated Command Prompt (not the easiest thing in the world) in order to enable hibernation on a laptop computer.

Don't get me wrong - Vista is not, as I've heard some people say, "the next Windows ME" - and I would definitely urge early adopters to get into it now, for some really cool features (BitLocker is a must have on a laptop). But Vista does have a few sharp corners in it still.

Published Tue, Jan 9 2007 18:25 by Alun Jones
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Comments

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

Can't you go to the power management control panel? That is where hibernation control has been before Vista.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007 11:01 PM by Phil O'Serf

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

Not there now - I can set several options from there, like what to do when the lid closes on the laptop, that kind of thing. I can even see several options that are still set to Hibernate - but if I select them, I am given the choice of Sleep and Shut Down.

You actually do have to run a command to turn hibernation on. No GUI.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007 11:17 PM by Alun Jones

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

The push toward sleep mode becomes less gentle.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007 7:54 AM by Phil O'Serf

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

Phew... I am so glad I found this page. I have been going mad for a few days trying to enable hibernate after I accidentally removed it because I opted to clean up the disc space use by hibernate. The Run as Administrator bit above helped me so running powercfg -h on worked. Thanks a lot Alunj

Bernie

Monday, January 22, 2007 12:53 PM by Bernie

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

this page really help me. i was also playing stupid removing hibernate by disk-cleanup. But i cant believe that microsoft stupid enough to forget enable option. damn!

Wednesday, May 09, 2007 2:50 PM by natalie

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

problem solved! first get admin right by running "msconfig.exe" and at tab "tools" click "disable UAC" then click "launch" button. To enable hibernate run "powercfg -h on". Thanks for ur help! By the way, its good idea to keep disable UAC as its suck!

Wednesday, May 09, 2007 3:01 PM by natalie

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

I would definitely advise against disabling UAC - after all, without UAC, you have no protected mode in Internet Explorer, and you have no prompts when a piece of software tries unexpectedly to use an admin-only operation.

I think disabling UAC should only be used if you're going to engage in a marathon session of installing software onto a machine - and after you're done, re-enable it.

But I did find out why I got no right-click menu for my Start menu.

Saturday, May 12, 2007 2:36 PM by Alun Jones

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

Oh you star!!

I've been trying to fix this for months now, and this is the only solution that has worked!!

THANK YOU!!!!

Monday, August 20, 2007 12:38 PM by Kaz

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

All you have to do is go into the c drive and click on windows then go into system32 then find cmd.exe and right click on it and select run as administrator then type in powercfg -hibernate on and there you have it.

Saturday, October 06, 2007 3:08 PM by Michael

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

hey that disable UAC was a total life-saver! I knew about the powercfg -h on but was totally stumped when I got the 'You do not have permission...' garble.I admit UAC sucks but its sound advice to re-enable once you've finished your task. You never know with microsoft its better to be safe than sorry.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008 9:51 PM by FCP Trainee

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

thanku

friend u helped me with this

otherwise i m in a mood to redo the installation of vista

once again thank u

Wednesday, January 21, 2009 8:11 AM by Mallikarjuna

# re: GUI lets me disable it, how do I enable it?

last thursday night I had few hours to try to remove vista to intall XP on a friend's laptop. When shrinking the Vista partition I found that there was a a large lump of "unmovable files" (as described by defrag in XP), whihc limited the amount of shrinking I could do, as they were placed between the 70Gb and 75Gb. I thought that it may be the hibernation file, I googled and found a page which refers to this page.

NOW, BEAR IN MIND that I had never seen vista until that night, I have two W2K pro and one XP system.

I think that I did start/Run "powercfg /hibernate off", which gave me an istantaneous flash (too quick to see anything but the flash) of a cmd box. Note that I did not use Ctrl+Shift+Enter at any time: that laptop has ONLY one user, so (if it works like XP), that user IS the administrator.

After this operation, the "unmovable files" where still in the same place, but given that many manufacturers place all sort of recovery data half hidden sometimes in invisble partitions (DELL cetrtainly was used to do that), I thought that maybe it could be some of those. I also shrunk the pagefile to 256Mb (the laptop has 3Gb of RAM), which also had no effect on that large block of "unmovable files".

I now ask myself if I really succeeded in removing the hibernation setting or if Vista has this "administrator mode" which needs to be invoked even if the user is the administrator (i.e. however many user there are, the administrator can only carry out "administrator operations" if the "administration mode" is invoked first); and considering that the laptop is still using Vista, if it is required to "re-enable" hybernation or not.

BTW I don't have direct access to the laptop anymore (my friend is gone back), so I cannot just search for HIBERFIL.SYS, but we communicate by YM and maybe we can still check and change few things.

Thanks for shedding some light on the matter and thank you in advance for the help you may provide.

Sunday, October 11, 2009 4:28 PM by berillio

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