What's the deal with the hibernate feature?

I thought it was the sleep function that suspends the system to RAM, with the Hibernate function storing the system state to the Hard Drive, which requires no power.

@ragingloli Well something is messed up, it must be the source that I was reading from cause they said that it uses the smallest amount of power.

Hibernate definitely requires no power.

What @ragingloli said. Hibernate stores a snapshot of the current state to the hard drive and shuts down.

‘Sleep’ is running with miniscule power.

Hibernate uses the smallest amount of power because it is, in effect, turned off. But all modern PCs draw a small amount of power when off so they can turn back on, since there usually isn’t a switch on the power supply itself. Just like modern day TVs, stereos, etc.

When you removed the battery, you probably killed any power source at all. So the computer had to reboot from scratch.

You don’t mention what type of computer or what operating system you are using; I had an old PC that if you put in “hibernate” it would have to boot up again.

@zenvelo It didn’t start from scratch, and windows 7

With hibernate, the PC itself boots from scratch (goes through BIOS POST etc), but then Windows is loaded very quickly from the settings that were stored when the system was hibernated.