laptop stuck in hibernation mode.

I have a user who has a laptop (Compaq e500 with Win 98) that when booted goes through the Compaq bootup screen directly to "restoring from hibernation".

It does not respond to ctrl/alt/del and rebooting just brings us back to "restoring from hibernation". I had her remove all power and the battery for over 2 hours and it does not boot past this screen. I let it sit at that screen for hours with no effect.

I know how to turn off hibernationa and other power saving features and whatnot, but I've never seen a laptop get stuck at boot like this that removing all power did not cure. Any ideas would be helpful.

I don't have any suggestions for fixing the current problem, but i would definitely disble it once you get it up. I can't count how many times I've had customers come to me with the same problem. Of course all of them were ok once I removed power from them for a a few mnutes.


I hope the best for you

Compaq hibernation is the worst... :mad: but I haven't seen this problem. I have 2 Compaq laptops and the utility sucks, thankfully they both run 2k now..Unfortunately the notebooks are never totally shut off.

You can easily get into DOS with a boot disk right?

Try the following:

- get to a C: prompt, look in the HIBERNAT folder, and look for the file that's the biggest (should be about as big as the amount of RAM the user has) . Delete it or rename it. (This file might also be in the root folder of the C: drive.)

- fdisk /mbr. this won't "fdisk" the drive, it'll just delete the master boot record.

- get into fdisk, look for non-DOS partitions.

- last resort is to format but I'm sure you know that...

If you can't get into DOS at all, try clearing the CMOS, either by taking out the CMOS battery or there might be a jumper (I doubt there is though). Or try taking out the RAM, powering it up, then putting the RAM back in.

Best of luck, and as said above definitely disable this feature as soon as you get it back up! :)

I didn't see that you tried going into safe mode. When you do, are you still helpless in hibernation, or can you function to turn off the feature?

I agree with ya_know. Try and disable all that stuff in safe mode.

On a different note: Hibernate and Standby are two different options. Hibernate saves your memory and the current state of the computer to a file on the hard drive, shuts the system down and then on reboot restores everything in that file back to the state it was in when the computer entered hibernate mode. Standby on the other hand only shuts down the system "half-way" it keeps the data in the memory by feeding current to the memory but shutting down the rest of your system. By removing the power source you were doing nothing. That would only work with the standby. Hope I enlightend you all. Cheers.

Yeah, she's gonna have to send it in to me. It skips the floppy seeks at startup. Thanks for the tips everyone.