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I can't enable hibernation in Windows 7 because there is not enough room on my C: drive to create the hibernation file. How can I make Windows put the file somewhere else?

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You can't, it has to be in the root of the boot drive (the C: drive in your case).

Raymond Chen explained the reasons why in this Windows Confidential article: The File System Paradox.

Hibernation follows a similar pattern. Hibernating the operating system means dumping the entire contents of memory into the hibernation file; restoring from hibernation entails sucking that file back into memory and pretending nothing happened. Again, it's another chicken-and-egg problem: to load the hibernation file, you need the file system driver, but the file system driver is in the hibernation file. If you keep the hibernation file in the root directory of the boot drive, the miniature file system driver can be used instead.

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To bad windows can't handle this, I'd really need it for my SSD. I hope that they fix it in the future so you can choose where to put it like in Mac OS X. – Hultner Jun 29 '11 at 11:41
Yah, in my opinion it's a bit of a design flaw. Even if the system needs to boot from the main drive, there's just no reason to have to store all the gigabytes of information on the same drive- the hibernation file could load the basics (e.g. drive access) and then look to another drive for additional data. Unfortunately, they didn't design it to handle that case- which means they won't until a new OS... if ever. – Namey Sep 21 '11 at 16:19
@Namey: If the hibernation file could load the basics, then it might as well be written straight into the boot loader in the first place. Then you open up a whole nother can of worms. On another not, I wouldn't consider it a design flaw either. It was written back in the days of Windows NT I presume, where speed, memory limits, and low CPU power were the big factors, not small SSD drives. Heck, who would of predicted SSDs being so common in the first place?? – surfasb Oct 27 '11 at 6:31
It's just pretty words about "chicken and eggs" which doesn't matter: if boot loader knows how to load hibernate file from disk to memory, there is no reason for not to have file system driver inside boot loader. – Denis Barmenkov Jan 10 at 14:06
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Actually, I have Windows 7 loaded on my C: Drive and about a year ago relocated Hiberfil.sys to my D: Drive when experimenting with SSD's. I'm no longer using my SSD and want to free space up on my D: Drive, and now can't remember where I made the change to change it back.

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