Precision Mobile 5510 will not hibernate following 1709 update

Another symptom: after an attempted hibernate, "wmic bios get serialnumber" gives nothing; after a reboot it returns the service tag as usual.

If I disable hyper-v via bcdedit, hibernate is back again. This doesn't really solve the problem since I need hyper-v (hibernate with hyper-v enabled worked just fine before the 1709 update). Note that I'm not trying to hibernate with another VM running.

More info:

If I do "shutdown /h" from the command line, it goes to the lock screen instead as usual, but after unlocking, the message in the window says something about "insufficient resources." This appears in other contexts, so I tried the usual cure which involves the "Memory Management" registry keys. This gets it into a state where it will occasionally hibernate, but not consistently. So while turning off hyper-v does fix the problem, it does not strictly speaking seem to be an incompatibility between hyper-v and hibernation.

What does powercfg /a show on the 5510?

The fix for the 9365 relates to specific systems like the 9360 and others.  I do not know what those systems have in common but I think you stated a model after the 5510 did have the same fix available.  Possibly it is related to the Processor or Bios version and its capabilities.

My CSEnabled in the Registry shows 1.  I understand the build upgrade made that setting ineffectual regarding sleep availability.  So you might set it back to 1.

Otherwise, the way we used to clear the Bios was to remove power/battery and then the CMOS battery.  Some motherboards had jumpers which could remove the power to the Bios.  f your system does not have any other way to deplete the CMOS power, you might hold the power button down for 20-30 seconds.  Please understand, since I have not tried this I cannot suggest you follow this procedure.

OS reinstalls will not help.  I did rollbacks and clean installs of prior builds.  Anytime 1709 was involved, either as an upgrade or clean install, the problem returned.

powercfg /a is shown below, but note that this is after a 1703 rollback, and CsEnabled is set back to 1. But it was the same when I had 1709 installed, Hibernate is always listed, Fast Startup can be disabled via appropriate setting. Note that S3 is intentionally disabled in BIOS because allowing sleep creates some problems caused by a group policy setting that is imposed on me (long story). But I tried with it on and that didn't change things.

C:\Users\jsberg>powercfg /a

The following sleep states are available on this system:

   Hibernate

   Fast Startup

The following sleep states are not available on this system:

   Standby (S1)

       The system firmware does not support this standby state.

   Standby (S2)

       The system firmware does not support this standby state.

   Standby (S3)

       The system firmware does not support this standby state.

   Standby (S0 Low Power Idle)

       The system firmware does not support this standby state.

   Hybrid Sleep

       Standby (S3) is not available.

       The hypervisor does not support this standby state.

I tried holding the power button down for various amounts of time (attempting unsuccessfully the RTC reset even though the 5510 is not indicated as being supported), that didn't help anything. They presumably changed something at the hardware level to make the RTC reset possible in the 5520.  

The CMOS battery is very tough to get at in the 5510; technically possible, but it involves a nearly complete system disassembly including fan and heatsink removal, and the consequent cleaning/replacement of thermal paste, not something I'm inclined to try on a laptop. Besides, I'm not even sure whether such a reset would fix the problem, and in any case there at least should be a software fix to the issue.

One other note on some of my observations above: I concluded after my experimentation that after you attempt to hibernate the system, the system is in a bit of screwed up state; I was originally assuming that if I just took it out of airplane mode everything was fine, but in fact there are indicators that it isn't, as least with some low-level BIOS communications (Power Manager misbehaving, "wmic bios" not giving results). A reboot brings it back to "normal."

Well, you don't have a modern standby system like the 9365.  

Maybe if you got your sleep situation straightened out the problem would resolve itself.

I don't remember an option to disable sleep in the Bios, but I don't have that machine.  Have you created a new power scheme which does not allow for sleep so those options are not available?

In the BCD Store, the boot manager has an option for resuming the system.  It uses the hiberfil.sys driver to do this.  Did you add the option to hibernate to the power options on the Start Menu Power button?  If the system is not able to create a hibernation file it probably will not hibernate correctly.  Since you seem to have a non-standard system, for some reason, maybe that process is being interfered with.    But the 1709 upgrade did seem to have some effect on the power operations of some systems.  None of my non-modern standby systems experienced any problems, however.

In my original testing, I did have sleep enabled in BIOS (but all my power schemes had sleep disabled). As long as I leave the system plugged in, sleep is fine if I enable it (the issue is that group policy disables sleep while on battery, but not when plugged in, so if you sleep while plugged in then resume on battery, the system boots from scratch; thus I keep it disabled).

I did enable hibernate in the start menu power button, as well as for the power button and lid close. I use powercfg /h to ensure I had a full hibernate file (see above), and it exists.

In any case, hibernate works just fine in 1709 as long as hyper-v is turned off (which I can do easily with bcdedit). So it doesn't appear to be a problem with hibernate itself.

Other than the group policy setting I mentioned, the system should be pretty standard. Also, I've seen posts from at least two other 5510 owners with this exact problem, so I'd be a bit surprised if this was related to sleep settings in group policy.

The 1709 update did make a change to power configurations where they removed the standard power profiles (Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance); however, you can effectively re-create them by creating a new power profile, and those three will be offered as templates. I tried doing this, and that didn't help.

Power schemes are tied directly to the video driver.  On Dell systems you may have a Dell and Balanced but the other ones can disappear.  Installing a Video driver from another source may be different.

There was also an change in the Battery options.  Now, if you click the battery icon you should be a scale on which you can choose performance.

Yes that's what I saw: a Balanced that hung around and a Dell scheme.

I also noticed the battery options change in 1709 and didn't quite understand it: clicking the battery showed the old "standard" schemes (Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance), which (before I created my own schemes) didn't all exist (only the Dell and Balanced schemes showed up in the Power control panel), and the Dell scheme didn't appear on the list. So did 1709 introduce some kind of split in the power schemes (video driver vs. battery?), or is this an indicator of an underlying bug? If there is a split, how does one even get at the properties of the schemes (or whatever they're called?) that show up when you click the battery?

I don't know all the ins and outs of the power schemes, just that they are tied to a video driver.  The battery options may work within the basic settings.  You might check your settings and see if any change in the Power UI when the Battery scheme is changed.