Re: hibernation file location

"John Hensley" <resqware@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:4099A8F2-BEF5-4D94-A090-2490C5F598D1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

With XP and 2K the hiberfile is read into memory by NTLDR

Yes.

which can only access the file via ROMBIOS int 13h.

No. I see you remember NTBOOTDD.SYS but I'm going to explain anyway.

If a disk controller driver was copied to the system partition (where NTLDR, BOOT.INI, and NTDETECT.COM reside), and renamed as NTBOOTDD.SYS, then NTLDR would be able to read a kernel and drivers from the boot partition on a drive connected to that controller, even if the controller didn't have a BIOS. Windows NT4 SP4 and later automatically generated a file NTBOOTDD.SYS but it could also be done manually for the working version SP3, and for Windows 2000 and XP.

I don't recall if I tried hibernating XP in that configuration.

Thinking about the generalities of the BOOT.INI file, specifying a number of controllers and drives and partitions, I'm still trying to figure out how NTLDR could load drivers for all of those controllers when all of the drivers had to be given the same filename NTBOOTDD.SYS.

Though it is common to load the non-bootstrap components of the OS from a non-int 13h accessible drive using an ntbootdd.sys mini-port driver, I am assuming NTLDR doesn't search anything other than the actual boot drive since the presence of a valid hiberfile prevents boot.ini from being processed and thus any information about the actual system drive would not be available.

But how does NTLDR even know which partition to read HIBERFILE.SYS from? Even though NTLDR refuses to give the user a choice to boot another partition's system instead of resuming the hibernated one, the hibernation file still resides on a boot partition with a kernel and system files of a Windows installation, not on the system partition with the boot loader. The boot loader still has to read BOOT.INI and scan to see if a hibernation file somewhere is ready to be loaded.

I suspect that the changes to Vista necessary to support BitLocker and BCD would allow Vista to locate the hiberfile on any drive but I doubt Microsoft would document such behavior because it would be a giant security hole on a BitLocker system.

Oh that's no problem, Microsoft asserted a clause in a licence in order to protect the security of the BitLocker system.

.

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