Disable Hibernation on Servers

Date Published: 27 June 2010

Disable Hibernation on Servers

Here’s a quick tip if you should find several GB of your system drive taken up with hiberfil.sys on a production server machine (as I recently did with a virtual server with a very small C partition) – Disable Hibernation.

Disable Hibernation

  1. Open a command prompt as administrator

  2. Run this command:

powercfg –h off

  1. Done!

The hiberfil.sys file should immediately disappear. This also works on desktop computers that never use hibernate, of course. Thanks to SpearManfor the tip. I’ve only tested this on Windows Server 2008, but I’m pretty sure it will work on most modern versions of Windows (7, Vista, 2008 R2, etc.).

Steve Smith

About Ardalis

Software Architect

Steve is an experienced software architect and trainer, focusing on code quality and Domain-Driven Design with .NET.