SOLVED: Troubleshooting Windows 10 hibernation with PRimoCache

[BonzaiDuck]

System description: This is the sig i7-6700 with Sabertooth Z170S motherboard. It now has dual-boot OSes on a 960 Pro PCIEx4 M.2.

It is working perfectly-- as far as I can tell. Windows 7 has a slightly cleaner Event Log, but Windows 10 only shows errors for a 6-year-old scanner with only Win 7 drivers and software available. Warning yellow-bangs for either OS are benign. The discussion at the scanner web-site concludes that the Win 7 drivers and software will work on Win 10, and they do. But turning on the scanner throws a WIA error and a related "stisvc" documented in the scanner discussion. Users are suggested to "live with it." But the scanner performs properly without a hitch.

I have tested Sleep and Hibernate in Windows 7, and they work reliably and perfectly.

In Windows 10, Sleep works properly -- no errors or problems awakening. But Hibernate results in the following events and observations:

1-- The screen goes blank
2-- the drive light flashes -- perhaps because of writes to the pagefile located on an SATA disk
3-- The system LEDs and other illumination, fans etc. remain on. [That is, the system doesn't go into hibernate]
4-- clicking my mouse simply brings the system back, showing the Windows 10 log-on screen. And . . it's not going through waking-from-hibernate, because the log-in screen appears immediately.

I have tweaked all the items in device management such as mouse, keyboard, USB controllers/hubs/ports in their "Power Management" settings, disallowing them waking the computer, and disallowing the computer to suspend them to save power.

I have deleted my old hiberfil.sys through turning hibernation off and then on again in the elevated command window.

Then, some forum troubleshooting thread or post led me astray, to suggest reinstalling Intel ME or MEI, and suddenly, the system was throwing new errors in the logs that web-search indicated were related to ME/MEI.

So I restored the Win 10 boot volume to what it was early yesterday, because I was beginning to have problems with this ME driver as well as IRST.

Does anyone have any experience troubleshooting this hibernation problem in Windows 10? It seems fairly common. The cop-out answers I've found suggest "why use hibernation at all?" This is likely the last and only little problem I'm having with Windows 10, with Event Logs blue and clean, sleep working properly, no USB failures at boot time or switching back and forth from Win7 to Win10 through dual-boot menu.

I must be missing something. But no way am I going on detours with Intel drivers again.

PS. Maybe I forgot to say that sleep and hibernation work fine in Windows 7.

 

[XavierMace]

I don't use the hibernate because there's no point, but I'd recommend turning Primo off and see if that fixes it as I could easily see that interfering.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I don't use the hibernate because there's no point, but I'd recommend turning Primo off and see if that fixes it as I could easily see that interfering.

It doesn't interfere in Windows 7.

In fact, hibernation actually maintains the contents of the RAM caches without setting Primo to restore them -- an option which assumes that you will either "Restart" or "Shutdown" and "Boot."

But as a matter of fact, I did turn it off in the process of restoring the Win 10 system partition from yesterday. And it doesn't make any difference.

However.

I did discover, with the attention to the Intel ME driver, that its properties contain a "Power Management" Tab. I unchecked the box for "allow computer to suspend . . " etc. I have yet to test hibernation again. If I find out that this had something to do with my problem, I'll follow up here for anyone interested.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You've disabled "Fast Start" or "Fast Boot" (one of those) under the advanced Power-management options in Win10. That may be one of the "optimizations" that Win10 does.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

You've disabled "Fast Start" or "Fast Boot" (one of those) under the advanced Power-management options in Win10. That may be one of the "optimizations" that Win10 does.

Well -- Larry -- Xavier -- I fixed it.

I did disable quick boot, as I usually do with any new system. I don't like the "Logo" screen or any of that crap.

In past episodes with this "fails to go into hibernate" problem, the culprit had always been some USB device with a "Power Management" tab in Properties that needed to have the first of the two checkboxes unchecked. I don't even know if I can explain it well. The item is "Allow PC to suspend or sleep this device" or similar wording. It seems counterintuitive, but leaving that checkbox selected fouls up hibernation.

So as I said -- stumbled on some forum posts somewhere suggesting reinstallation of the Intel ME driver. And as I also said -- that took me into a dark forest of more trouble.

Even so, I happened to open the System node in DM, and looked at the properties of Intel ME. It has a Power Management tab. The box was checked, so I deselected it.

Finally decided after a few hours watching L&O on the TV that I would re-enable hibernation and try again. Curiously, I note that the hiberfil.sys has a size between 6 and 7 GB, which I'd noticed before early in troubleshooting. That wouldn't seem right: If I had set it to 50%, it would be 8GB for a 16GB RAM configuration. So I set it to 100%, if only temporarily.

Now I have a theory as to how it appeared to be 6+GB, and it relates to PrimoCache RAM allocations. But that had nothing to do with the problem. I can say this, because I'd reset it to 100% for testing it before I examined the Intel ME properties in DM. And -- it fails to hibernate, anyway.

Deselecting the checkbox in DM->System->Intel-ME seems to have made it right.

I can hibernate. Now to sort out the particulars about how big I want that hiberfil.sys.

See, I don't like the fact that the hibernation file results in writing at least some part of its size to disk every time there's a restart or shutdown. More TBWs. But the system has to work perfectly. Now that it does, I can choose to hibernate or not to hibernate.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

UDPATE:

XavierMace may be correct -- that PrimoCache active memory caches defeat hibernation. I had not recreated these two 2GB memory caches that I use until AFTER I had satisfied myself that the system hibernates properly.

After recreating the caches, the hibernation failure arose again. Deleting the cache tasks, rebooting, and testing hibernation resulted in success.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

So this is finally resolved. What seemed (to me!) as an obscure button on the PrimoCache setup screen offers a checkbox to "release L1 cache . . . on hibernation."

The problem wasn't Primo; the problem wasn't Win10; the problem was lil' ol' me. But I was ignorant -- not stupid.

 

[XavierMace]

I accept payment in cookies.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Can I get CCleaner to send them to you?