Disable Hibernation before enabling Hyper-V on a laptop

14 Jul 2011 in Microsoft on Hyper-v

If you enable Hyper-V on a laptop (or any other machine where hibernation is enabled automatically) you’ll find that you won’t be able to delete the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys).  Although hibernation is effectively disabled, the file remains in use once Windows has booted:

Additionally, in an effort to remove the lock on the file, you can’t use POWERCFG to disable hibernation after Hyper-V is installed:

While there’s a work-around to get hibernation working,  there’s not much to gain with hibernation enabled on a fast SSD drive. Especially when dual-booting puts space at a premium and the hibernation file is 8GB.

Just remember to disable hibernation before enabling Hyper-V with:

POWERCFG -H OFF