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XP - explorer hangs after resume with USB flash drive

By varsakelis ·
I'm stumped by this one - would greatly appreciate any help:

1. On an XP machine, I plug in a USB flash and move some files on/off it, work, etc.
2. I put the machine into hibernation, with the USB stick still attached (i.e., without "safely removing it").
3. I bring the PC out of hibernation.

Now, when I try to open the USB flash or look at my hard disk, that window just hangs (I get the "hourglass" mouse pointer when moving over the window). "Killing" the window kills explorer.exe.If I manually run explorer.exe after that, it still does the same thing. The only way out is a hard reset.

The problem has appeared suddenly, without me having installed any new programs recently.

The problem does NOT occur if I "safely remove" the USB stick before hibernating.

Anyone out there have encountered this before?

Thanks,

Dimitris

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You've already answered your own question . . .

by OldER Mycroft In reply to XP - explorer hangs after ...

Except that you don't understand the answer.

A quick lesson in Hibernation.

Hibernation, when invoked, takes a 'snapshot' of the contents of your machine's memory - ALL of your machine's memory.

A machine with 512MB ram has 511MB hibernation file.
A machine with 1GB ram has 1023MB hibernation file.
A machine with 2GB ram has 2047MB hibernation file.

The reason the hibernation file is exactly 1MB smaller than the amount of ram, is so that when you come OUT of hibernation, there is some FREE system memory - otherwise the machine would not be in control of itself.

By leaving your USB ram attached you are overloading the system.

Let's say your USB stick is 1GB. When you invoke hibernation a 512MB system would attempt to fit 1.5GB of active system ram into a 511MB space. Get it?

Actually, your system isn't crashing when it comes OUT of hibernation - IT CRASHES ON THE WAY IN TO HIBERNATION -you just don't notice it until you start up again!

<Edited for typo>

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not so sure...

by varsakelis In reply to You've already answered y ...

Hmmm... I'm not sure this makes sense (to me).

First, I am able to hibernate/resume with the same USB stick attached to several other XP machines without problems. The problem started happening only recently on my machine (i.e, it was OK before). If what you say is true, I shouldn't be able to do this anywhere/anytime.

Second, the hibernation file stores the contents of the PC's RAM, right?
The USB Flash shows up as an external drive, therefore its contents are NOT stored in the hibernation file, or are they?

In any case, thank you for taking the time to reply.

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