Troubleshooting a boot-time, restart and especially -- hibernation problem

[BonzaiDuck]

Occasionally, during restart, the system will complete the shutdown process, but won't produce the reset "beep" and post. Hitting the reset button (so far) produces a successful post and boot into windows.

Hibernation isn't reliable, and resetting the hiberfil.sys by turning hibernation off and then on after cleaning the disk hasn't fixed it.

I'm wondering if it couldn't be the CMOS battery, and am considering a BIOS upgrade flash and across-the-board driver update.

If the problem is a degraded component of the motherboard itself, then the system is toast. I'm just now completing a pass of HCI Memtest64, and it doesn't seem that the RAM is the problem.

 

[Burpo]

From another forum.. Maybe worth a try..
"Open Device Manager and go into mouse and keyboard properties:

1. uncheck "allow the computer to turn off the device to save power".
2. Check "allow the device to wake the computer".

I haven't had the problem since doing this."

 

[BonzaiDuck]

From another forum.. Maybe worth a try..
"Open Device Manager and go into mouse and keyboard properties:

1. uncheck "allow the computer to turn off the device to save power".
2. Check "allow the device to wake the computer".

I haven't had the problem since doing this."

Mmm. . .. My focus the first go-around was the Intel NIC settings, but I can see the possibility you mention here.

Over the last day of my previous post for this same question under "PSUs," I put the system through its paces frequently to test my own preliminary tweaks with hyberfil.sys. I'm a little groggy this morning, so I may have forgotten what else I did.

Oh, yeah. I carefully updated the NVidia Geforce driver and replaced the MSAHCI native driver for the SATA controller with Intel's. The turning point may have been the update to the Intel chipset driver.

So, yesterday, I had about 15 sleep->hibernate->wake-up sequences of which one or two hung with a blank screen before or just after system post. Also, I've observed that this can happen after Win Updates does its thing unattended with this new monthly update paradigm MS is following. The October update together with KIS 2016 really caused me a panic -- on two near-identical machines with Windows 7.

Early this morning, the system came out of hibernate automatically to back itself up to the WHS'11 server box, then went back to sleep. It would not have gone to sleep with the troubles I'd had earlier, nor would it have backed up.

I'm still going to keep an eye on it before turning it over to my 91-year-old moms. But I feel pretty confident now about the hardware, running continuously but for a day or two from the time I built it. The PSU is still good, the RAM is still good, the motherboard -- still good.

I'm still considering a conversion of MBR to GPT for the storage, and I always have the option to reinstall the OS.

But for the initial USB/mouse&keybd problem which comes and goes, it all looks promising for the hardware.

Now let me see about those mouse and keyboard Device Manager settings . . .

 

[BonzaiDuck]

From another forum.. Maybe worth a try..
"Open Device Manager and go into mouse and keyboard properties:

1. uncheck "allow the computer to turn off the device to save power".
2. Check "allow the device to wake the computer".

I haven't had the problem since doing this."

OK . . . . we just can't retain everything we know about Windows in detail. Here's what I discovered (or "rediscovered").

The mouse and keyboard nodes in Device Manager all contain entries for "HID compliant" mouse or keyboard. There is no "Power management" tab in their properties window.

Instead, the "Generic USB Hub" or "USB Hub" have power-management tabs, but the checkbox for "allow this device to wake the computer" cannot be set and are blank. But the other checkbox for these USB hubs was checked, and I unchecked them.

Now we'll try again and see if this solves it. With a KVM, it could be useful to make a keyboard a wake-up device. The down side arises when you put a machine to sleep and hit a key or move the mouse before switching the KVM. With the mouse, it often doesn't take more than a bump on the desk to cause a wake-up.

UPDATE: No. That didn't fix it. But it now occurs to me that I've seen this "no keyboard" at boot-time from every machine on the KVM switch, including my Skylake system.

I think I'm really going to feel inclined to eventually replace this Avocent KVM, and it's gonna cost me. Since I keep two workstations and my server under the desk, and I have a good Logitech wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse, I may choose to find just a two-port KVM. Four is nice, but not really necessary. The server can run headless, but it's always good to have the option for a monitor connection.

Wish I'd got to the bottom of it before the end of the 30-day RMA window for the Avocent.