No Hibernate Tab in Win98 Power Options

[sburtchin]

I have APM enabled in my BIOS. I have hibernation configured for Windows 2000 and it works flawlessly. The Windows Help in Win98 says that it supports hibernation and includes instructions. But there is no Hibernate tab in the Power Options. According the the Win98 Windows Help this means that my BIOS does not support hibernation. Can the BIOS support hibernation for one operating system, but not for another?:confused:

[Sylvander]

"Can the BIOS support hibernation for one operating system, but not for another?"
Surely not!

Can't help you get it working in Win98 though; I only discovered the feature when I installed Win2000Pro, and no longer have Win98 in operation.
I'd expect it to be a feature of the Windows OS.
All windows does is save the software environment [everything running] to a hibernation file and shut down the PC [with settings saved in the registry (mabe in the "Runonce" key) to tell Windows how it should load at the next startup].
No special features of the BIOS needed for that.
Then when you switch the PC back on, instead of Windows loading as it normally would, it loads the content of the hibernation file into RAM and the software is back where it was before hibernation.

[Paul Komski]

Can the BIOS support hibernation for one operating system, but not for another?Well, as so often, it probably depends on what is meant by "support". The BIOS software routines have "conversations" with the operating systems that run on the system. The DOS based OSes rely on the BIOS for just about all pertinent hardware information and may have to rely on just those funtions that are available in their software libraries. The NT based OSes however (apart from needing information about boot devices) will poll, enumerate and utilise the hardware for themselves - independent of any conversation with the BIOS software functions - once the system has booted up into its GUI.

It thus looks as if the NT based OSes can utilise finer detail of the mobo's hardware than what they can discern from any available BIOS routines - just as they can differentiate between say two hard drives in a hardware RAID array, whereas under the DOS based OSes the BIOS would only ever report the array as a single hard drive volume.