How to diagnose failure to hibernate after hard drive swap (yet sleep works fine)?

Solution 1:

It turned out to be some kind of problem with the boot partition. While Windows booted fine and showed no problems in the event log, running the Win7 "startup repair" did find and repair problems. Once this was done, the machine hibernated fine again. (shrug)

Solution 2:

You could try this troubleshooting tutorial. It's for Vista but should also work for 7.

Solution 3:

I had the exact same problem. After cloning my old hard disk to a new disk using Clonezilla, the computer booted and worked fine, but hibernate did not. Screen was going black, but it never hibernated - moving the mouse would bring it back to the desktop.

The first thing I noticed was the default operating systems was blank in the dropdown here:

Start > right-click Computer > Properties > Advanced System Settings > Startup and Recovery Settings > System Startup

This pointed to a problem with the boot partition.

To fix this I used Disk Management (Start > right-click Computer > Manage > Disk Management) to set the C drive (the second partition after the small 100Mb or so one) as Active.

Immediately restarted and used Windows 7 DVD to boot. Click Repair, and use the Startup Repair wizard to find and fix the problem.

This time, when rebooted I got BOOTMGR is missing.

I then booted a second time using Windows 7 DVD, used the Startup Repair wizard again.

On the next boot, Windows started normally, and now Hibernate works.

I can only think the clone operation corrupted the boot partition somehow - not enough to stop Windows booting though. It seems Startup Repair needs to be run twice to totally repair the partition and bootloader after setting C drive as an Active partition.

Hope this helps someone else, as it's taken me all day to sort this out :)