17 Dec
I was (for my sins) working on a Windows Server 2008 box today. To make it worse it was a VM with very little disk space. In trying to find things to remove I found hiberfil.sys sitting there at 4Gb! I tried to delete it but Windows wouldn’t let me. I then went into power settings, disabled hibernation (or so I thought) and tried to delete it again… still no joy.
Anyway, it turns out the easiest (or only, I don’t know) way of deleting this stupid file (why Windows SERVER would need to hibernate anyway is beyond me!) is to drop into command prompt and run the following command:
powercfg -h off
Easy when you know how, but annoying if you don’t!
Stumble it!
January 9th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Thanks so much. I, too saw this stupid file, and, after trying almost every I knew, finally gave up and just accepted that I had lost all that wonderful space.
Your post gave me the answer. You’re a genius.
January 15th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
WOW, I would never have found that.
It is always amazing to me how difficult it is for programmers to see all the ramifications of programming decisions they make or don’t make.
Windows of course has no ONE person who can see everything, consider everything as a whole.
Working as a programmer myself, we have broken our system up into so many parts, with so many people each having a special function that even humpty dumpty would not be able to fully appreciate the potential for unintended consequences regarding any one change.
November 17th, 2010 at 8:09 am
Well, this doesn’t work on all servers. I have eight machines with windows 2008 standard, and was able to remove hiberfil.sys on seven of them. On the last server nothing happens when I try powercfg -h off. The file is still there.
March 6th, 2011 at 12:16 am
Nothing happened..
The system (Win7Pro 64bit) said that “no permission to On or Off hibernation mode…”
Why? I’m the only user on system and have admin rights..