A case when the computer stopped hibernating

October 17. 2022 0 Comments

I’m helping some person with some stuff over Skype and that person complains that every time he shares a screen, his mouse freezes periodically and that is very annoying. And we decided to fix it.

Initially, I simply blamed Skype. As you probably know, I really hate to see what Microsoft did to Skype. But we tried Zoom and it has exactly the same problem. Then I remembered that AMD Ryzen processors 3000 and 5000 series has that problem and it was supposed to be fixed.

A short search revealed that the first thing is to try to install the latest version of BIOS. That person has a Gigabyte board, and it has one of the worst applications for updating BIOS from Windows I have ever seen. But while we are downloading a new version of BIOS, we found that disk C is close to full. We decided to clean it and we ran the Windows Disk Cleanup utility.

We successfully update BIOS and the original problem was fixed. But after a few days, that person said that the computer stopped hibernating. We checked and it also is not able to go to sleep. And it looks like the computer is not even trying to go to sleep.

We tried all the usual commands to diagnose problems with sleep and hibernate:

powercfg -energy

powercfg -requests

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

powercfg –restoredefaultschemes

powercfg –a

We messed up with devices as we thought something woke the computer immediately after sleep. Nothing helped.

Obviously that we started to blame the new version of BIOS. I checked everything there and everything looks correct. We did reset all settings but nothing helped. We are checking Event Viewer again and again and at one moment I realized that I see event #45 quite often. And details for that event have the following text: “The system could not sucessfully load the crash dump driver”. Really strange event. And because I ran out of ideas, I decided to fix that problem.

And very quickly I found that that event is very often going side by side with cases when the PC fails to hibernate and sleep. And quickly I found a solution here. And indeed, “DumpFilters key had a “dumpfve” entry”. And then I remembered that there was a pending Windows Update and we ran Disk Cleanup.

I didn’t know that Windows Update is pending until Windows reboots after the BIOS update. The person I was helping actually asked me about it. But he asked “Should we do Windows Update” and I thought he means that we have to install Windows Updates. And it is a bad idea because then if something will go wrong, we will not know what to blame: Windows Update or new BIOS. So I said no. Then I realized what he was asking about, but it was too late.

So a few helpful things:

Before installing a new version of BIOS, it is better to restart the computer, just in case. Especially on somebody else’s PC.
When Windows asked you about a reboot, it is better to reboot, because Windows is already updated something and it is not a good idea to keep Windows in that state.
Read carefully what you delete in the Disk Cleanup tool.

I hope it helps someone.