MBP often won't wake after sleep.

Any idea how to "inactive the ethernet port"??

I experienced many of the same symptoms others have encountered in this discussion thread over many months. Here's where I'm at - hopefully this will help others. Methinks it is only a matter of time until many of you end up in the same place I am at 😟

I have an early 2008 MBP running Snow Leopard 10.6.4 encountering this very same "Black Screen of Death" problem 2010/08/06 — the MBP is not completing POST process (Power On System Test). I followed the SMC, PRAM/NVRAM and SMS reset instructions in Apple's KB articles with no success (HT3964, HT1379 and HT1934, respectively) and read pages upon pages of discussion forum postings looking for potential answers.

Further detailed research uncovered KB article TS2377. Based upon this article I took the MBP to the Apple Store for diagnosis on 2010/08/07. The Apple technician tried to boot the system with an external drive containing their NVIDIA test diagnostics software but of course that wouldn't work with this BSOD.

*Resolution in process:* The Apple technician ordered a new logic board (item number 661-4960) after verifying my serial number was eligible for replacement — _+*with or without*+_ AppleCare coverage?!? There is really no way to determine if the problem is or is not be related to the NVIDIA "Bad Bump Material" problem documented as far back as mid-2008 because the NVIDIA card is soldered onto the logic board. Either way both components will be replaced.

Further discussion with the Apple technician flushed out the word recall — which explains the replacement eligibility _+*with or without*+_ AppleCare. I called every Apple store in my immediate area (there are six) and none of them had this part in stock. So I'm waiting for the AppleCare process to get a replacement logic board shipped to my closest Apple Store with the standard 3-5 business day service turnaround commitment (maybe longer, maybe shorter).

I'm extremely disappointed in the level of support that Apple is giving in this situation. Here's why:

If there is a known hardware manufacturing defect that may result in a complete and total failure of a system, customers should be notified. Hiding this problem with a non-publicized UTR (under the radar) recall smacks of a business decision made to address this issue on an exception basis, minimizing Apple's out-of-pocket costs to fix the problem — effectively leaving impacted customers with a "boat anchor" situation. I realize these are expensive components — but who cares! Cupertino-based business analysts already have a good handle on the failure rate % for each platform with this problem — Apple should have adequate stock on hand to provide an expedited resolution to this problem for its customers. No excuses.

Net/net: If your MB or MBP experiences a "Black Screen of Death" condition — don't bother trying to find a potential workaround! Get your system to an Apple Store or other authorized Apple service provider and be prepared to wait. I'm up to day five now. I'll post another again when there is some movement....

The Kwamster wrote:
Same exact issue here, Dylan. Out of the blue it's happened twice in the past week -- I close it, it sleeps, and when I re-open it, all see is a "ghost" of the state it was in, faintly on the black screen. No response to keys or trackpad. When I close it, steady sleep light. Very odd, but more annoying than anything.
...

I just had my MBP at the Genius Bar last night, and while there it had this happen. The tech had replaced the LCD panel and brought it out to me. When I opened it, the screen didn't appear to be working, be we finally noticed that it was there, but the backlight just wasn't on. He took it back in back and ran a few more tests and determined that the LCD was probably DOA, so he put a second one on. It had the same issue. He checked a few resources and found my problem was the logic board. The LCD inverter is on the logic board, and since they had put the wrong LCD on my system a week earlier, now that they had the hi-res panel in, the inverter would not put out enough power to light-up the 17" hi res screen, but it would light-up the 1680x1050 screen. He had a logic board in stock, so he replaced the logic board too and everything was back to normal.

In the last 7.5 months, AppleCare has replaced the logic board (twice now), the LCD (17" 1920x1200) and the DVD writer. Most of these replacements have been in the last 2 weeks, and I only have 17 or 18 days left on my AppleCare now. I guess it has really paid for itself...

Ok, this is weird!

I've had the wake-from-sleep problem for the last 6 months or so - shortly after adding 4GB OWC ram, which I assumed was the culprit somehow. I'd see the problem manifest itself at least 3 or 4 times per day, at least during work days when it's unplugged much of the time (lots of meetings). I use the Macbook Pro at work and home, probably 10 hours per day on average. I've tried a number of remedies, to no avail. Then a few weeks ago I added an OWC 120gb SSD, shifting my hard drive to the spot occupied by the optical drive.

Not only did the performance of my computer improve dramatically, but I haven't seen another occurrence of the wake-from-sleep problem. Prior to the upgrade I hadn't had a workday in 6 months without at least a few occurrences of the problem; I make this change and suddenly go to 0 occurrences over almost 3 weeks.

I had a similar problem with my MBP. I would leave my computer for a while then come back to find it in a pseudosleep mode. The front sleep light would be solid and the screen would be black. I could hear the hard drive spinning but nothing would wake it up. This would happen at least once a day. The genius bar was no help. I ended up deleting Norton symantec for mac and my problems have gone away. Not one issue. Hope this helps someone.

After having had this problem continuously since getting the 2010 MBP, with more or less success in getting rid of it (disabling putting the hard-disk to sleep certainly helped but didn't really solve it) I recently swapped the hard drive (500Gb, 7200rpm) for a bigger one (WD 1Tb, 5200rpm) and lo and behold, a bunch of problems suddenly disappeared. Even though this drive should be slower, operation is much quicker and sleeping/waking seems to work flawlessly, so a faulty HDD might have been the root cause of my problems that were always irritating but never irritating enough to bring it in. Happy camper here.

Update: 2 months of all-day every-day use have gone by and not one instance of the wake-from-sleep problem. Somehow the process of adding the SSD definitely fixed it. Don't know if a connector had been loose, or there was an issue with the SATA bus (HD is now secondary) or what, but it the problem is definitely gone.

hey all,

i recently bought my MBP off of craigslist, it was listed as having wake-from-sleep problems so i got a good deal for it knowing that i may at some point have to pay for a new logic board. before i bought it i looked at some of the threads about wake from sleep issues, and this one in particular had some people seeming to find fixes by taking off SMS and hibernation and so on

the MBP i picked up also likes to boot up from a shutdown into sleep-mode, (even with battery removed and replaced and SMC procedure done)

it looks similar to trying to wake it from sleep except it goes thru the grey boot screen first, then a quick screen flash and then ghost screen to sleep mode

but i came across some strange things when googling on the boot-to-sleep problem..

i had already tried resetting the PRAM according to Apples instructions with the battery in and AC disconnected, but i read somewhere (cant dig up the post now) to try it the opposite way, with the battery disconnected, and the AC plugged in..

so i took the battery out, plugged in the magsafe, booted it up, held down cmd-optn-p-r, let it ding a few times and..

VOILA! **** thing booted right into OSX.. tried it a few more times and seems to work each time.. even without resetting pram, just booting from AC with the battery out seems to let it boot..

now for the weird ****. so this got me thinking.. because it was still waking to a ghost screen on every sleep. so i started playing around with different combinations of sleeping it with; AC in, battery out, AC out, battery in. etc etc

and so with all that playing around i stumbled on something.......

when it boots to ghost screen if i pop open the battery cover, not even taking out the battery, just pressing down the release button until it pops open. the **** things backlight comes on and it wakes from sleep properly

any ideas??

if someone else is having these waking to ghost screen problems will you try popping the battery cover open? its really strange.

oh it also seems to boot from off fine as long as the battery-latch is pressed

like ***.........

I bought my new MBP in sep 10. Recently the sleep issue started bothering me. It occurred the first time after a couple of times I had gotten a gray screen saying that I had to shut down my computer. After that the sleep issues started.
Somewhere else in a discussion somebody suggested PRAM and SMC reset. Nothing worked. Then I read about the secure virtual memory check/uncheck box in the Security preference panel. I unchecked the secure VM and the sleep issue was gone.
Yesterday, it started again, with the Secure VM unchecked! What I did: I checked it again, rebooted, then unchecked it, rebooted again, and: !!!!! the sleep issue was gone again.
What a mystery: this problem is bothering Apple customers since 2007 on different lap tops and nobody at Apple is able to help us.

I

Having the same problem as wel... open my Macbook Pro (mid 09) and the screen doesn't come on at all, fans come on and the sleep light turns off though.

Tried pretty much everything but restoring from a backup, which I'm about to do soon.

I went to the Apple store in my area and their tests, waited 5 days..but at least I got my bottom case replaced for free.. (I asked if they would give me replacement rubber feet because mine were chipped, there was a 50$ charge initially). So, I turn it on at the store to see if everything is working then I get home and open it up...you can guess what happens. They probably didn't run the tests, probably just replaced my bottom case.

So now I'm going to try restoring. I'll post results after.

I'm also having issues with the blank screen after sleep.

I'm on 13" MacBook (alu), OS X 10.6.6.

I've done:

# daily, weekly, monthly cron scripts, reset system, home permissions, cleared system, local, user cache, reset launch services (Yasu application);
# repaired disk permissions;
# reset PRAM and VRAM;
# deleted com.apple.PowerManagement.plist;
# ran Apple Hardware Test (short) - found nothing;
# reset SMC.

I'll be running the long Apple Hardware Test then shipping it to Apple service. I don't quite remember when it started but I'm thinking it could be the upgraded RAM.

I've also analyzed Console logs and no error is seen anywhere.

Any other ideas?

Message was edited by: BSG75

I did a reinstall of Snow Leopard last night, backed up my info excluding system files. Problem was still present in the morning, in fact it happened twice in a row. So I guess this can't be a software problem, unless it's one of my applications but I think this is unlikely since I didn't back up my system and user library files. Or maybe it is a software problem from a previous update that didn't get fixed or was overlooked.....

Here's what I've done so far:
-Reset VRAM/PRAM + SMC
-Repair disk permissions
-Ran OnyX
-Reinserted RAM
-Deleted com.apple.PowerManagement.plist
-Ran hardware test
-Installed 10.6.6 combo
-Brought to Apple store where they found nothing
-Reinstalled Snow Leopard via erase and install

This is seriously getting annoying, has an Apple rep even looked at this?

My problem seemed to occur because of using a virtual machine. Not using the virtual machine made the problem go away. Now with 10.6.6 my problems seem to have gone away.

i solved my problem with a bit of a hardware hack

it has been working fine for a couple months now

as i said in my previous post, i noticed that it seemed to start up fine when the battery latch was left open, infact for awhile i would simply start it up, then when it got the the desktop and before it fell back asleep i would press the battery cover latch down and viola! it would awake fine

so i decided to go into the laptop to figure the problem out, knowing that it had to be hardware related

narrowed it down to the battery cover latch assembly

took the assembly out and examined it

Apple really loves their magnets i have to say, this one little latch has THREE just in the mechanism alone

so after a bit of trial and error i came up with my theory, Apple engineers hadnt accounted for the fact that 3 magnets in close proximity, especially with opposite forces on the middle magnet, can cause the middle magnet to swap polarity

and this is essentially what happened, i guess some bit of buried software uses the magnets to tell if the latch is closed, and wont turn on the screen fully unless it is, but after a time of the 3 magnets sitting side by side with eachother, the middle one swapped polarity so that it now would only allow the screen to turn on in the latch was OPEN

to fix this i added a FOURTH magnet into the latch on the side of it, to counter act the one that had swapped poles

no problems since

and please no comments about magnets near hard drives and such, these computers come so loaded up with magnets from the factory that i would be afraid to leave my credit card on top of it

also while i had the computer in pieces i tightened the lid side of the screen hinge. a five second repair that apple care had told me wasnt possible without a $300 replacement of the entire screen.

while i love my mac, thank god i have worked on PC's and their quirks for the last 16 years (since i was 8)