Hi Folks, My machine is unable to hibernate: when I try, it cranks the HDD for 10-15 seconds, and then returns to the login screen. If I assign a drive letter to the win 7 hidden partition, hibernation works again. I can un-assign the drive letter in the same session, and hibernation still works. Upon reboot however, hibernation returns to its broken state. If this issue is a symptom of a basic problem somewhere, there might be other symptoms as well: bcdedit doesn't find the bcd store unless I assign a drive letter to the hidden partition. And my machine sometimes fails to assign drive letters to some USB drives, but that might stem from a different problem. Any idea what might be happening here, and how to fix it? I suspect it might have something to do with active partitions (my hidden partition is marked as active), but that doesn't quite seem to jibe. Folks who dual boot seem to run into some similar issues at times - when the other OS partitions are marked as active, hibernate seems to break. I have tried the following, none of which have helped: ran sfc /scannow; booted into clean boot mode (MS services only, no startup progs); ran a Startup Repair; ran chkdsk; reverted all services to their default install state; reinstalled video, network and chipset drivers. I have no USB devices. All network devices have their Wake option disabled. Hybrid sleep mode is disabled. I can sleep my system with no problems. No system restore point is available from before the problem cropped up. Ideas are very welcome! I would love to lick this problem without screwing up my system with a repair install. thanks, alex Win 7 Pro x64 Thinkpad T400 2764-CTO 6GB RAM 500GB HDD ATI Mobility Radeon 2450 Fully Updated OS and drivers

Hi, You need to install the firmware update for the HDD. Hard drive firmware update utility (Bootable CD ISO) - ThinkPad Important Note: Microsoft provides third-party contact information to help you find technical support. This contact information may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this third-party contact information. Please download the upgrade the following the instruction in the website to upgrade the firmware for the HDD.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

arthur, thanks for your reply, but there are two problems with your proposed solution. in order of relevance: 1) Hibernation was working just fine with this drive for a long time. 2) the HDD firmware update utility does not work for my drive (Hitachi HTS725050A9A) The latest updates to my problem, which I think give clues as to what might be happening: running the following command and setting my C: partition to Active allows my machine to hibernate without having to assign a drive letter to the hidden parition: bcdboot c:\windows /s c: I then assigned the hidden partition to E:, ran bcdboot c:\windows /s e: , and rebooted. The same old problem as it always was returned. bcdedit isn't able to locate the bcd store (it *is* able to locate it when i put it on the c: drive). There is a report from someone else who was never really able to repair his bcd file: * "I had a problem with hibernation restarting my computer, and finally figured out that there is a problem with your BCD (Boot Configuration Data Store) in the boot folder (ex: C:\boot\bcd). Most likely its a problem with the "Resume from Hibernate" section of the BCD which points your computer in the direction of the operating system to resume from and to. You can edit/view your BCD by opening up command prompt and using the command bcdedit /? for a list of options. Anyway I tried everything to fix the hibernation problem, including using EasyBcd, but the only thing that worked was installing another copy of windows on a different partition, this rewrites the BCD. Then you can uninstall that extra Operating System. Now the BCD should be corrected. Hope this helps, I couldn't find any info on this subject for months so I just played around with the BCD, and installing another OS" (from http://www.sevenforums.com/general-d...-ultimate.html ). I don't know that my problem is with the BCD store itself - perhaps it's some partition table issue, or some pointer somewhere? I also tried booting into recovery console. From there, running "bootrec /rebuildbcd " says that it finds 0 windows installations on the machine . Running "bootrec /scanos" also comes up with 0 installations found. Running bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot don't help