Computer constantly falls asleep during parition resize
Just downloaded latest ADD version yesterday. Committed a resize operation that would obviously take 2 hours or so. Rebooted and the ADD countdown screen began. Last night, at about 4%, I went to bed, thinking that the job would be completed in the AM.
Not so. The computer was asleep. My computer is setup to sleep after 10m of inactivity. Upon nudging the mouse, the computer woke up. No screen video, so hard to determine status. However, I could tell the HD was working like heck. So, with (literally) blind faith, I sat at the computer nudging and clicking in order keep the computer awake. I am not a good nudger/clicker, because the computer ended up falling asleep about 10 times.
Good news. At some point, the HD ceased to show activity. Without any video, I assumed it was done and did a hard reboot. Success.
HOWEVER, shouldn't ADD tell the system NOT to go to sleep?!?!?!? And, what's up with the no video?
Happy to blame my system for the no video AND in the future I will turn off sleep prior to a partition operation that will take awhile.
HOWEVER....
.: eric

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Vista is the same. Microsoft made entering standby a higher priority in Vista back around 2006 as an answer to complaints about laptops not shutting down when the lid was closed. It's now required that programmers explicitly instruct the OS not to enter standby until their program's threads finish execution, so this one is an Acronis oversight. TI has the same problem.
If you do the operation from the boot CD this won't happen.
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I didn't know this, having skipped Vista myself. Hey Mark if you would indulge me a slightly OT question: for command-line programs (during which W7 will go to sleep also) do you know any better way to handle these than to include a powercfg command in one's batch files? E.g.
powercfg -change -standby-timeout-ac 0
and then return it to 20 or something coming-out? This works fine for me but I wonder if there's a more elegant solution...
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Tom:
You can use scheduled tasks to work around this. On Vista, a scheduled task that woke the PC would start to run and then the PC would go back to sleep 2 minutes later because it detected no user activity (the user inactivity timer interval is 2 minutes). This bug has been fixed in Windows 7. Any task started by Task Scheduler will run to completion before the PC is allowed to go back to sleep.
So one workaround is to start your command-line program from Task Scheduler. If it's a program that you run frequently, set up a scheduled task and then either start the task from TaskScheduler, from a command prompt, or from a shortcut. To trigger the task from a command prompt use:
schtask /run taskname
where taskname is the name you gave the task in task scheduler. If you're a programmer, look up SetThreadExecutionState on TechNet for other ways of preventing sleep mode while a program is running.
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>You can use scheduled tasks to work around this.
Thanks for the info. BTW I have read a couple complaints from Vista users about Windows 7 in this regard (going into standby/sleep that is) so it does seem that MS has gotten even more aggressive about this than Vista did.
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Thanks, gents. I am running Vista and will be more careful in the future.
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