Method and apparatus for facilitating device hibernation

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that enables a computing device to save additional power by entering a "hibernation mode," wherein the active state of the computing device is preserved in non-volatile storage while power to volatile storage is turned off. During operation, the system reanimates a computing device from a hibernation image by restoring reanimation code from the hibernation image and then executing the reanimation code. While executing this reanimation code, the system restores the rest of the hibernation image by, reading compressed data containing the rest of the hibernation image, and decompressing the compressed data using computational circuitry within the computing device. During this process, the decompression operations are overlapped with the reading operations to improve performance.