iMac won't wake up from sleep using keyboard or mouse

Hello Qholmes

In your Energy Saver Preferences, what do you have checked? I have Put the hard disk(s) to sleep...

and Start up auto after power failure. Thats it.

I have Put hard disks to sleep and Allow power button to put to sleep and Automatically reduce brightness

Q

What i do is unlpug my mac and reboot! 😀

Have you tried to just do a force to sleep using the Command and Option and Eject buttons or if your power button is set up for sleep you can just use that... if i do that and wait a few seconds then it comes back... A pain but it works and is faster then rebooting for sure

Q

Similar problems - iMac won't completely wake. I can get the screen to come back (by pressing the power button) but iMac won't respond to wireless keyboard, mouse, or trackpad. I have tried plugging in a USB mouse but that doesn't get reccognized either. I can't tell if it is an Airport issue with an Apple TV ver. 1 or an issue with 10.7.2 with bluetooth. It doesn't happen all the time but about twice a week I have to do a hard reset to get it up and running again. The only other thing running that may be causing this is my EyeTV recording something but that is generally not set to record.

I have cleared out all of the caches and reset permissions and updated the OS to the latest. Nothing seems to fix this problem. It started when I upgraded to Lion.

Hi, you may remember me from having reported this issue disappeared when I turned off my 2nd monitor.

This was true and remained so.

But yesterday, the same clicking sound that happens when waking, kept going & going... BOOM.

My (internal) hard drive failed & is now dead. RIP.

I'm still under warranty (9 month old iMac) so it's getting replaced.

This may not be related at all, it's just that ominous clicking sound that the hard drive makes when waking was so similar to when it died that I couldn't help make sure I let this thread know my ultimate fate ;-)

My hard drive was not under the replacement program for iMacs made between May-July 2010 (? can't remember the dates) but I will always wonder whether it should have been.

Having similar problem. Sometimes my i5 27"IMac wakes up from sleep both from the mouse or keyboard other times it 'appears' not to wake up. The screen stays dark however I can hear activity on the hard drive when I click the mouse or press esc but the screen never goes back on. Upgraded to LION and still having the same problem. Only thing that works is holding down the power button and rebooting. This seems like on ongoing issue Apple should really address this.

When my iMac a0.7.2 freezes (no response from bluetooth keyboard, mouse, trackpad) I can insert a DVD and see the message that the DVD is not playable. Also if an email notification goes out from iCal I see a finder notification bouncing in the dock that the email server is not available. Still nothing I do will allow me to unfreeze the machine. In energy saver I have the box checked to 'restart automatically on freeze'. That feature has never worked. It is like the computer isn't actually frozen but is having a bluetooth problem. Very frustrating.

Having the same problem. I installed a new 1TB hard drive clean install of lion yesterday and done all the updates and I haven't installed everything I need yet to test it. Came in before and the screen was dark but keyboard or mouse wouldn't work. It's a 24" iMac 2.8 cpu, 4gig ram etc. Worst thing is this is my first mac had it for 6 weeks and I'm really thinking about selling it and going back to a PC. I'm just not sure if it's hardware or software. Once or twice it has had a white screen when I had the power settings to never turn off hard drive or screen.

Hi! Sometimes this seems to happen to me, and I need to reboot my wireless keyboard, pushing the button on right. The little green light comes on the keyboard and shortly the computer finds it and I can wake up the computer in a matter of seconds. Does this help?

Hi mate doesn't help me because I have a USB keyboard and mouse. I hope it helps someone. Think I might just fire up the Windows 7 rig and go back to life as it was.

Rebooting the wireless devices does't work for me nor does plugging in a usb device. I have to do a hard restart after a freeze.

I have found that by setting the 'computer sleep' to a longer time than 'display sleep' keeps the freeze from happening. My computer sleeps at 25 minutes and my display at 10 minutes. It's been about a week now with no freeze. It was freezing every few days.

Having posted a few replies to this discussion I thought I would share an update. I was convinced the problem I had with the machine not waking from sleep was a software bug having taken a look at the sys log. Indeed like many on this discussion, I altered my power setting (wake from LAN) and the problem stopped.

Having just upgraded to latest OSX I decided to switch wake from LAN back on just to see if the problem was still there. Two weeks later I can report no issues. Screen safe and sleep both set to 15 minutes.

For me it seems that Lion fixed the bug. J.

Hi Jason I'm seeing wake for network access in Lion same thing? I would love to try this and see what happens. Thanks for helping.

Daz

Hi Darren-- I only started to try using sleep with my work computer in the last couple of weeks or so, and was surprised when it wouldn't wake right away. It had a power supply problem about 5 months ago and that was my first concern. Eventually using the power button got it back. First time was after it had slept a long while and was more or less a restart. Today, it came back with a light touch to the power button, but I couldn't type anything in the password box. What seems to happen is that when the work computer goes to sleep, the keyboard (and probably trackball, too) more or less dies (or sleeps) also. I unplugged the USB keyboard from the computer and plugged it back in, which then woke the computer.

I did a search hoping to find a better solution than unplugging/re-plugging the keyboard.

I don't have the same problem with the home computer, but, that keyboard is wireless, and everytime we put the computer to sleep we also power off the keyboard. So powering the keyboard back on at home seems to wake the computer right away.

I'm still hoping there's a better solution than plugging and unplugging the keyboard from the USB port.

Why would putting the computer to sleep cause the keyboard to stop working properly? Especially when it takes a properly working keyboard to wake up the computer...