Laptop has Standby/Hibernate disabled

[Aske001]

Looking for hints from RFD experts:

I am trying to fix a Toshiba A10 laptop (running WinXP SP3) from a family member which currently has Standby and Hibernate modes disabled, although they worked in the past. I've fixed this type of problem on my own laptops before, but I'm stumped on this one. I've tried all the usual things, e.g., checking that it has the up-to-date ACPI BIOS, re-installing all the major device drivers for ACPI, video, sound, LAN etc., deleting the old hiberfil.sys, making sure that Fast User Switching is enabled, getting rid of any unnecessary programs and services, etc.. I've tried it with and without the Toshiba power management utility installed. Neither Windows nor the Toshiba power management utility offer any option to enable hibernation or standby modes, which means they think it isn't available. Anyway, it seems likely to be a device driver or ACPI problem since Standby mode isn't enabled either. But the ACPI device driver says it's working correctly, and there's probably a hundred other device drivers (counting hidden ones), and they all appear to be working correctly too.

Since Standby/Hibernate last worked, this system has been updated to XP/SP3 and it had a registry cleaner run on it (groan! yes, I know), and who knows what else. There are no backups or restore points from when it last worked. The owner doesn't want to clean it all off and re-install from scratch unless he absolutely has to.

Does anyone know of any way to get more diagnostic information about which device driver might be the problem? Surely if Windows knows not to enable Standby, it must know which driver is the problem, even if it isn't telling?

Any other ideas?

[board123]

Just reformat the system.

[soccer08]

I had this same issue with my HP laptop. Hibernate would usually get disabled after I did a disk cleanup through the control panel.

To re-enable it, just search "re-enable hibernate" in the help menu of your computer and it will then give you the link to turn it back on.

EDIT: Nevermind, I read your post again and saw that you already tried this.

[Aske001]

I'm backing up the current disk contents, then I'll try re-installing the original Toshiba WinXP recovery CD and re-upgrading it to SP3 to verify that Standby/Hibernate works from that configuration. But years worth of apps have been installed on the current configuration, some of which may be hard to track down and repeat now. If a way of diagnosing the Standby/Hibernate problem can't be found, he might just have to live without it.