Hibernate is disabled, hiberfil.sys gets recreated at each boot

I have Windows 7 running on a small (40GB) partition, with 4GB ram. This means that the hiberfil.sys file created by Hibernate takes up a significant portion of the available diskspace. I would like to remove it.

I am aware that I can disable Hibernate and remove hiberfil.sys by entering powercfg -h off in an elevated command prompt. This works -- the file is immediately removed, and after doing so, the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Power\HibernateEnabled key is (correctly) set to 0.

However, the next time I reboot the PC, hiberfil.sys returns from the dead, Hibernate is reenabled, and that registry key has returned to 1.

I'm pretty much at my wits' end with this. Almost everything I can find online related to removing the hiberfil.sys file simply suggests using powercfg to turn off hibernation, and that appears to work for just about everyone. But it just keeps coming back for me! (Like a vampire, sucking up my disk space.) I did find one other thread from someone who seems to have had the same issue, but none of the suggestions there worked for the original poster (or for me). Still, I have tried everything listed there, including:

• Disabling hybrid sleep

• Disabling Hibernate through the command prompt, through the Power Options GUI, and through both (in both orders)

• Manually changing the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Power\HibernateEnabled key

• Pretty much everything else I can think of!

I do want to reiterate that I have no problem removing the file -- that works great. It just comes back after every reboot. I'm about ready to throw in the towel and just run a script on login to disable Hibernate each time, even though that seems like a crazily hacky "solution" . . . but I was hoping someone here could suggest something else, first.

My Windows 7x64 install is on an SSD partition on a Mac laptop. I've disabled with powercfg /h off (elevated) and ms fixit's disable hibernate, as well as the setting registry key HibernateEnable value to 0. Hiberfil.sys is deleted only until reboot. When I boot native hiberfil.sys is always re-created, but when I boot inside OS X and VMware Fusion, the hibernation stays disabled, as it should.

Tom Wijsman's suggestion of ProcessMonitor with boot logging helped me find that vmtoolsd.exe (from VMware) was re-enabling the registry key during the native boot. I tried to change the permissions in regedit, but they did not stop the value change to 1. I thought about creating a small hiberfil.sys, but I think that would ave been overwritten.

As a 99% solution, I changed the HiberFileSizePercent value to decimal 1, which makes the hiberfil.sys only 80MB on an 8GB RAM machine. I suppose I could try .001 or less, but 80MB is not much.

You can easily troubleshoot this with Process Monitor.

Start it and enable Boot Logging in the Options menu, restart your computer and start Process Monitor.

Then, let it stop capturing and then search for HibernateEnabled and check what changed the value.

For more advanced insights, this can also be done with XBootMgr from the Windows Performance Toolkit.

Installation Instructions - On/Off Transition Performance Analysis Document

If you're using boot camp and vmware fusion:

Find the file

%programfiles%\VMware\VMware Tools\plugins\vmsvc\disableGuestHibernate.dll

and delete it or move it.

Finally, disable hibernation once and for all by opening an administrator elevated command prompt and running:

powercfg -h off

The disableGuestHibernate plugin loads when vmware tools loads. If vmware tools loads while running in a vm, it will disable hibernation (since vmware has its own suspend system making hibernation redundant.) But if vmware tools loads outside of a vm (i.e. you use boot camp to boot into windows instead) it will re-enable hibernation if its disabled.