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I have Windows 7 Ultimate SP1. Today I saw that Disk:C is totally full. I don't take it seriously but after some time many errors started to occur.

Some of the errors say that the disk hasn't enough space to proceed. Then I go to Disk:C, select all folders and click on properties but the properties panel said that all the files took only 45.6gb of space.

Then I clicked at show hidden files and operating system protected files. Then the problem is front of me. The file name hiberfil.sys is of 126.9gb. I cannot understand what caused this file to take so much memory. Its name is something related to hibernation mode.

I decided to delete this file but no sucess even booting in safe mode.

I am sure that is not not a Windows bug because I have all the updates installed.

Because it has taken almost all space I can't do anything instead of rebooting windows. Do you have any recommendations for solutions I can try?

Chenmunka
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John Mafia
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2 Answers2

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The file hiberfil.sys is required to store your RAM to disk in case of hibernation. It does not need to be bigger than you RAM, and is typically 75% of it. So unless you have ~170GB main memory, yours is way to big.

You can delete the file by disabling hibernation: open a command prompt in admin mode and type powercfg -H off.

You can re-enable hibernation, which creates a new hiberfil.sys, with powercfg -H on.

With powercfg -H -Size <PercentSize>, you can set the desired size of the file in percent of your main memory (can't be less than 50).

ths
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Hiberfil.sys should be the same size as your RAM, so do you have 128 GB or RAM ?

To get rid of it do these steps, taken from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/920730

This should erase hiberfil.sys, you might want to do a disk corruption check before to make sure your drive is not failing and giving the wrong size because of that. Also I would backup my files if I suspected my disk might be failing.

To make hibernation unavailable, follow these steps: Click Start, and then type cmd in the Start Search box. In the search results list, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator. When you are prompted by User Account Control, click Continue. At the command prompt, type powercfg.exe /hibernate off, and then press Enter. Type exit, and then press Enter to close the Command Prompt window.