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

I believe I have seen a similar issue twice now. In both cases I think I had pressed Alt Cmdeject twice within a few seconds before the screen blanked. I suspected the machine had failed to sleep when an external drive had not powered down and the bezel around the screen remained warm to the touch for some time.
On the last occurrence I tried plugging in a wired mouse that I had to hand, but the LED didn't light up. The machine did not appear to be available on the network either.

I'm now using the Sleep button from the Login Window and am wondering if anyone has experienced the same 'unable to wake' issue having used that button?

I agree that there seem to be numerous causes related to not waking from sleep depending on your HW config, OS level, Bluetooth attached devices, etc. I was searching to solve my no wake problem and I came up this thread and resolved it by simply deleting my 2 BT devices from Apple (keyboard and mouse) and re-installing/pairing...seems that my problem was that the "allow BT device to wake computer" option was greyed out for some reason and the only way to get it back was to re-pair... I now can wake from touching keys.... My system is a 2010 iMac 21 inch i5...all SW up to date. Hope that helps!

Hi Andy,

Happy that the deleting of BlueTooth devices helped you. It seems that that there is also several levels or layers of not waking up here: Some are related to have the machine to respond at all, others to get if to move from responding to actual working normally, passing beyond spinning wheels or blue-screens.

Unfortunately mine is that last type, and even completely erasing the HD and installing everything using the latest combo update did not help me. After two days I still get either the blue screen or spinning wheel after a night on sleep.

Message was edited by: John Christiansen

Some one said on the other forum that even replacing the motherboard is not fixing the problem.

Got two 27" iMacs, 4mths & 1 mth old, sleep/wake up problems with both. Doesn't seem to have any effect after loading updates. Tried many things with no success, beginning to think it was cable or power supply problem on 1st machine until the arrival of the 2nd one along with the same glitch. Keystrokes ctrl-shift-eject-return will be next on the list, failure will result in return to store.

Near twenty year Mac user and haven't been so dispirited as now.

HI stokeith,

Sorry to hear that brand new iMac also have problems with waking up.
Do you get it to wake and then login - with spinning wheel?

The last couple of days I have tried to disconnect different USB cables - with no apparent effect.

Have you tried to investigate the reports in the Console (error reporting)?
I today identified this error in the keychain:

Jan 8 08:28:32 xxxxxxxx loginwindow[42]: ERROR | -[LWKeychainSupport unlockLoginKeychain] | Unable to unlock the keychain, SecKeychainLogin returned -25293

I'm not an expert, but have now changed the login and the keychain passwords to be the same. So far no problems. (Now I'm also checking some errors reported from widgets)

Do you have different passwords for computer login and your keychain (as many recommend to improve security)?

Message was edited by: John Christiansen

Hi all, just go the 27" i5 two days ago and had this issue occur whilst transferring files from old backup disks. The display would go to sleep and I would be unable to wake it either from wired or wireless inputs.

To troubleshoot the issue, I tried playing around with the Energy Save settings. I set the Display Sleep settings to 1 minute and the computer sleep to 15 minutes. I couldn't replicate the issue with those settings despite numerous attempts to copy files and waiting for the display to sleep.

I then set the Display sleep to 10 minutes and the Computer to sleep after 3 hours and so far I couldn't see the issue occurring.

TL/DR - I changed the sleep settings so the display sleeps earlier than the computer and the problem hasn't occurred yet.

Hi spawnster and welcome to the forums,

Interesting if your changes of energy settings will do the trick. Please report back.

I have myself continued to track the error reported in the "Console", as I could se on the screen that the login process stopped after I have entered the password, and the computer kept looking for something (spinning wheel).

In the console report I found this message for the time of the problem:
"ALF error: cannot find useragent 1102"

Someone else here had a similar problem and replaced the keychain from a TimeMachine backup:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2712087&tstart=75

After replacing my keychain with a backup, it seems to have improved here also, as I can login after sleep. So one advice could be to try and check the error log in the Console around the time when one is having problems with login.

Message was edited by: John Christiansen

Thanks John, so far I have not experienced the issue again since the change. Not sure if this works for everyone but just thought I'd share.

Good luck!

Hi all,

Problem also occurs here with my late 2009 i5. I've noticed that looking from a 45 degree angle, with a spotlight directed to the screen, that i'm able to see what is going on on the display. (e.g. i can see my finder windows, mouse pointer moving etc..) Anyone noticed this as well? After that i restarted a few times, but no display visible.. Turning off and on again seems to bring the display back, but it's scary stuff..

I've kinda solved the problem by unchecking 'put the hard disks to sleep when possible' and putting the 'Computer sleep' to 'never'.. now the iMac display sometimes doesn't come out of sleep (i think this is a related issue) but this can be solved by putting the computer to sleep by the keyboard command (cmd alteject) and bringing it back.

Anyway, a lot of people seem to have this problem and although i'm really happy with the computer's performance, it was too expensive to have this serious problems. A € 1600 computer shouldn't have these issues. I didn't read topics about any successful repairs towards this problem, so i am hesitating to send my computer back. Also because i need it for my work.

What to do?

Regards,

Well, looks like I'm joining the thread. I have a 1 month old 27" quad processor iMac with an ATI Radeon HD 5750 board. Three times in the past two weeks I've put the computer to sleep manually before going to bed at night, only to find that it is unresponsive the next morning. Have to press & hold the power button to get it running. Another poster suggested waking it up by doing a CTRL-SHIFT-EJECT and then a few seconds later a RETURN. Will give that a try next time. If that doesn't work, perhaps I'll be doing a Never Sleep option. Arrrghhhhh!!!!

I've had a 27" i5 Refurb (HD5750) for a few weeks now and all except for exhibiting this effect a couple of times it's working great.

The first time I had the issue I was running 10.6.5 and the second time 10.6.6. Same as other posters it seemed like it had come out of sleep but just the screen was blank, I could connect for file sharing but couldn't make the screen come up.

After the first time I thought I'd setup screen sharing so that if it happened another time I'd see if I could get a remote screen even if the actual screen wasn't showing. When it happened the second time I fired up screen sharing, got connected but got no screen window, not just a blank window but no window. I don't know what this means, maybe nothing or maybe it indicates some issue with the display subsystem not coming out of sleep properly?

Anyone having this problem got proper apple remote desktop installed as I believe you can do much more with the remote machine with that and perhaps can get more information from it when it is in the blank screen state?

Anyway, I've changed some of my energy saver settings to minimize the auto sleeping and also set up the screen corner expose screen sleep action as suggested by another poster to see if that works if it happens again.

Regards...jeremy

Same issue here. It's very random, can't seem to find anything in particular that would make it wake fine one day and not the next. This has happened on my Mac Mini at work as well.
My iMac is a 27" core i5 2.8ghz 2010 model. Every once in a while have to turn it completely off and back on to get it to wake up.

Edit: I'm in the habit of putting my computers to sleep when not using them, so I do that through the Apple menu.

Message was edited by: mattd313

Hi mattd313,

What do you mean by not wakening: Does the computer go to the login window or it is before?
Have you tried to investigate the messages in the Console?

John Christiansen wrote:
Hi mattd313,

What do you mean by not wakening: Does the computer go to the login window or it is before?
Have you tried to investigate the messages in the Console?

I walk up to the computer, press the space bar- nothing happens. I try everything to wake it up, and nothing happens. The USB external drive doesn't light up, the screen doesn't come one, it doesn't make any noises. It's as if it were turned off.
At this point I have to hold the power button for about 5-10 seconds. Then press it again to turn if on.

I don't know what I'd look for in the console- but if you tell me I'll look.