How to move hiberfil.sys on to a different partition

[..:: Free Radical ::..]

Hi I need to know if someone managed to get there hiberfile.sys off their boot partition and on a separate partition/flash disk?

I read it somewhere on xtremesystems a while ago that people use this approach in carputers using flash disks.

i hate it when i have to keep the same space as the ram in the boot partition. I have configured my unattended windows setup to keep the program files and profiles folder on a separate partition and with no pagefile (winxp).

This decreases fragmentation of the system files and increases performance. So any1 know a way. The only fragmentation of my boot partition (which i had to increase to 4 gigs from just 2gigs...was really fast) is due to my need for hibernation. (note, i know some people will point it out to me that the hiberfil.sys file space is always allocated and will not cause fragmentation, but i want the smallest boot partition without any problems in installing windows.

I have learnt that it is not recommended to move the hiberfil.sys to somewhere else due to the risk of mismatch ( I may add here that this is a totally false notion because i have tried using different hiberfil.sys files and it seems there seems to be some timestamp checking so the system won't boot if there is a mismatch and hence there is megligible scope for problems.

Also, my temporary files, cookies and other junk are on a different hard disk which i don't care much about, and all my data is on a separate hard disk. I keep weekly manual backups of my system files (no ghosting/ partition images) which i can restore by booting off a PE disk.

Preliminary googling shows that this is very much possible on Linux , some laptop models with a hibernation partition (type 0x84) and with third party boot managers.

I hope since many of us can afford the luxury of ocing without a cardiac arrhythmia, it is only to easy to mess around with the software. So any tweak in this regard would be helpful.

TY

 

[Eazy]

I too wanted to move my Hyberfil to another partition but I could not find any way to do so even after doing a lot of search - so I finally did the next best thing - I have removed this feature from my XP setup

I maintan a 10GB partition for XP - I keep this partition small as I often have to restore an Acronis backup due to a bad driver or problem or corruption. I keep all my installed programs and data on a second partition. Acronis does the backup and restore of this 10GB partition in less then 2 minutes.

 

[..:: Free Radical ::..]

^ mine is only 3.5 GB

Only windows on C:

Program Files, Games, installed apps, User profile (the documents and settings) on D:

Music, videos, setups, Backups on E:

Cookies, junk, downloading files on another hard disk where i am even planning to install Ubuntu. (shall move it to my main hard disk when i am certain)

 

[pikachu]

I too want to do it......

 

[FalconEye]

Like many of the critical system files which Windows XP needs (Example: NTLDR, Boot.ini, NTDetect.com, etc.), the file hiberfil.sys HAS to be present in the boot partition of the disk. There are no tweaks to move the file from one partition to another, short of hacking the XP kernel.

The reason for this, is because the hibernate file tells windows, how and what to restore when your system wakes up. Windows can trust only one partition for this, which happens to be the Boot partition. The hibernate feature has to consider the fact that not all partitions may be available at wake up; some might be available on a network, some might be disconnected, etc. So the XP kernel, by design, can rely on just one partition to store the hibernate file.

However, if you do not use the hibernate feature you can safely turn it off, thereby saving 2 to 4 GB of your valuable disk space (depending on your RAM, of course).

Hope that helps!