Can't unhibernate windows partitions. Help, tried everything.
The Swiss Army Knife of System Recovery
Brought to you by:
rescuezilla
Menu
▾
▴
Hello, I have an issue with disabling hibernation. Drive was pulled from a laptop that lost power and then died(complete mobo failiure due to previous issues). Charger or any light won't come on and there might be a problem with the charging brick or barrel plug. I suspect that somehow it shut off instantly thus resulting in corruption. I was infomed that this isn't the case but i supect it might have happened.
All commands I tried from the threads here and online can't disable the hibernation so I can clone it. Although I managed to image it with Aomei backupper. I set up hibernation on purpose so it can save data in case the laptop loses power but was informed now that it was a bad idea. Should have set it to force shut down.
First, I got one message, rebooted than got another, see images. Could the cable be causing it? Afraid to delete the hibernation file manually and run chkdisk. The drive is healthy but sometimes shows errors for some reason. Previous backup is several months out of date and not that useful. What do i do? Usually the commands would work but not this time.
Last edit: Werewolf IT Support 2025-09-10
Images:
Advice, peeps, anyone?
The imaging function of Rescuezilla is designed for disks that are healthy. So you for sure won't be able to use the Rescuezilla graphical interface for this disk right now.
For forensic imaging of even deeply-damaged disks you can use a tool like
ddrescuewhich is available as a command line application from within Rescuezilla.This will allow you to image the disk to a file on disk (like Rescuezilla's "backup" mode), or directly clone it to a destination disk (like Rescuezilla's "clone" mode).
If you're comfortable in learning the ddrescue command-line interface, I recommend you use ddrescue to clone the disk directly to your destination. It's important to use
ddrescueto make an image or a clone without modifying the source disk in any way.Once this new cloned disk is created, your best bet is too try and boot it from within Windows. And perhaps run a chkdsk from Windows. It may do it itself, or you can do it from the Windows command-line.
The hibernation itself is probably not a big deal. The hibernation file saves the current session of Windows before the shutdown occurred, which helps speed up reboot.
Windows should clear the state itself when attempting to reboot the disk. Windows may end up rebooting itself a few times since the disk has filesystem errors too as you mentioned.
You can use
ntfsfixto remove it with a special flag, but in my experience can cause problems.Also by the way, I'm not fully clear what your goal is here. eg, to clone the disk to a fresh disk or just to make a regular backup image.
Once Windows has cleared the filesystem errors with
chkdskand rebooted it should be good to use the standard Rescuezilla commands again.Thanks will try and report back. Holy moly, I'm going to have a long night ahead of me. Thanks for reminding me about ddrescue.
Wait, won't booting the backup to a new machine, different from the previous host one corrupt Windows or file system? I've heard people if they swap drives and boot them from a different computer Windows starts corrupting itself, maybe data as well? Did I understand it correctly? Will take a break and read it again.
Swapping drives and booting from different machines can be OK.
The power-loss causing the hibernate file to be in a corrupt state may cause a blue screen that self-repairs.
Ideally after cloning, just booting the disk Windows will take care of it and return to a working state. Best case, after cloning you're like two reboots away from a functional system. Worst case, you need to run
chkdiskmanually and may need to dive further under-the-hood.I am back, trying a few guides. I want to clone from dev/sdb to dev/sda but no luck. First time so it's a bit difficult. Anyway here are the commands i tried:
root@ubuntu:~# -d -f -r3 /dev/sdb /dev/sda
bash: -d: command not found
root@ubuntu:~# ^[[200~# lsblk -o name,label,size,fstype,model~
bash: $'\E[200~#': command not found
root@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get install gddrescue
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
gddrescue is already the newest version (1.27-1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
root@ubuntu:~# sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/loop0: 1.24 GiB, 1328635904 bytes, 2594992 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 238.47 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Disk model: UMIS RPJTJ256MEE1OWX
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: E35CEF7B-6D85-420F-A1E6-1E7CC9645209
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 206847 204800 100M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2 206848 239615 32768 16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/nvme0n1p3 239616 498957345 498717730 237.8G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p4 498958336 500115455 1157120 565M Windows recovery environment
Disk /dev/sda: 476.94 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Disk model: ESD-T1A
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 33553920 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x5f2a8268
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 1000212479 1000210432 476.9G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Disk /dev/sdb: 447.13 GiB, 480103980544 bytes, 937703087 sectors
Disk model: SNA-DC/U
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x9787b6ce
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 67110911 67108864 32G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb2 67110912 937699327 870588416 415.1G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Disk /dev/sdc: 58.59 GiB, 62914560000 bytes, 122880000 sectors
Disk model: Flash Disk
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00a5f162
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 * 2048 122879935 122877888 58.6G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
root@ubuntu:~# ^[[200~sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/destination/image bs=1M count=0/path/to/destination/image seek=SIZE~
bash: $'\E[200~sudo': command not found
root@ubuntu:~# ^[[200~sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/ubuntu/Desktop bs=1M count=0 seek=480103980544
bash: $'\E[200~sudo': command not found
root@ubuntu:~# ^C
root@ubuntu:~#
The commands you're trying to run are EXTREMELY dangerous, and you are currently on the path to irrevocably zeroing/formatting your destination disk.
You need to understand that
if=/dev/zerois the input file, which you have set to the zero device. But what you actually wantif=to be set to your source partition.of=specifies the destination (output file).The command you want is
if=/dev/sdaXshould be replaced with your SOURCE disk.of=/dev/sdaYshould be replaced with your DESTINATION disk.The "command not found" is due to
sudonot being installed, but you don't need sudo since you're already root (eg command starts with#Since you've said /dev/sdb is your source disk and /dev/sda your destination then that's what you need to set.
Be incredibly careful and triple-check.
One mistaken character and you could irrevocably clone the wrong disk
Here goes nothing, pretty scary since it is my first time using the command. Quad checked and i hope i don't select the wrong one. Still, YOLO!
ddrescue: if=/dev/sda: Can't open input file: No such file or directory
What?
Getting somewhere:
root@ubuntu:~# ddrescue dev/sda /dev/sdb
ddrescue: /dev/sdb: Output file exists and is not a regular file.
ddrescue: Use '--force' if you really want to overwrite it, but be
aware that all existing data in the output file will be lost.
Try 'ddrescue --help' for more information.
Is sda your source and sdb your destination??
triple check or risk blowing away the wrong drive
you said earlier you want to clone sdb to sda. your command above is the wrong way around.
The drive names change / swap after reboot. I write them downn and take a pic and ask someone to confirm the drives to be sure. What happens if i use the - -force command?
Also the source is 480GB while the destination is 960GB. Dd rescue can't clone a bigger to a smaller drive, right? What happens if i overwrite the output file?
Sorry for being a pain in the butt. Dd rescue didn't work so i tried OpenSuperclone and it worked like a charm, frist time. Cloned everything, now to reboot and to run chdisk and do some data recovery on it.
No problem. the
--forcecommand is how you specify the destination disk is a actual drive rather than a file. You would need to use it to do the clone.Glad another tool worked for you. I've never heard of that tool until now.
I have an ancient GitHub issue to add a graphical UI to Rescuezilla to make ddrescue usage trivial: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/issues/143 but alas time is always limited.
One more annoying issue. The boot parition is esd-usb so converting it into a normal one? / removing and making a new boot psrtition, is it possible? The thing had this previously and it bootes normally until the laptop hibernated and died completley.
I have never seen an ESD-USB (Electronic Software Download) partition until now.
Converting to a normal boot partition is surely possible with advanced commands around rebuilding a Windows boot partition. But I don't know those commands. You may be able to resize the partition down and shift things to better utilize space, but that may break the boot, so I don't recommend it generally.
So your laptop works after cloning with OpenSuperclone right? Or is there still a hibernate issue?
Should be interesting if it removes it, there are programs that convert the data from hibernated to notmal. Hmm, worth a shot. Tried making an mbr boot partition and it kept taking up half the drive and not shrinking. Now instead of crappy windows install menu i get no OS found so i feel like I'm making some progress.
Tried booting the clone directly got the windows install screen. If hibernation is indeed removed i need to fix data corruption and move on instead of trying to save hibernated data as well. God what do i do? Maybe fixing up the machine just enough to reboot might be the best idea.
A bit of a rant (the whole picture of the situation):
Client (friend) got annoyed that i would ask to back up his devices monthly and he was warned every time. Used to treat flash storage as archival and lost a ton of data. Not a care in the world. Spent two weeks laptop 24/7 trying to recover five storage devices in total. Most of the data came back meh / unreadable / not openable. His designated backup device was a China Netac drive with YMTC flash known to leaking charge very fast and the drive ended up reading two days non stop trying to rewrite data but to no avail. That backup has been lost forever, hell even the image file i made isn't working either when restored. He declined a lot of backups thinking he would save some money/time? I have an elder technitian helping me but stuff is going slooooow. Some people prefer to listen to other people instead of people who do this for a living and i think karma is justified but they'll never learn or maybe care?
The bill currently is breaking records with twelve failed attempts, one succesful clone, uholy amounts of mental torture and ah, Microsoft. In the shop for two or more weeks active work as of now. I'm getting cancer after this for sure. This thing might require a machine to be on for three weeks worst case? Starting to deal with stuff like this more or less on a daily basis with other clients and i think i should give up on people like that. People starting to make me hate my own existance. I see why mechanics and other fellow techs are leaving working for the public instead going to support in companies. Still a bit cancer (lazy or ignorant cowerkers for ex.) but nothing beats public sector there.
The hibernated state can be cleared (with risk to the data) and the data accessed.
If you're not able to boot the clone you made OpenSuperclone, but have no issues with the rest of his cloned drive, then getting the laptop reinstalled with a fresh Windows then copying the files back in manually is not the biggest deal. May save you some headaches.
I didn't think of that honestly, absolutley genius. Knowing my luck this will be a gift that keeps on giving.
Yep, it will of course mean you or he will need to reinstall all his applications, but at least he'll have all his files and a laptop with an undamaged drive. Without the ESD-USB partition that you're concerned about too.
I have potentially great news. Managed to fix that bastard by putting some fresh solder on the chargjng port. Plugged the board in, lights started going off and it roared to life. Need to check if it has display if not well damn. Been fixing this for so long, hope I am close. Took the p*$$ out of me. I think i also got exposed to enough leaded solder for a lifetime.
Thanks for help. It purrs like a kitten now. This repair almost broke me but i pulled through.