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MBP often won't wake after sleep.

Quite often when I shut the lid of my MBP and it goes to sleep I will open it later and it will not wake.
It sounds like the hard drive starts up (there is some noise) but the screen remains black and the keys have no effect.
The only way to get out of the situation is to hold the on/off button until it switches off.
Upon start up no work or application windows are recovered!

This has caught me out a couple of times and I have lost work. It is very frustrating.
Has anyone had similar problems and/or does anyone have any suggestions.
I cannot take it in to a shop to be checked for the next few months as I simply can't afford to be without my laptop!!

MBP (late 2008), Mac OS X (10.5.8), purchased quite soon (half a month to a month maybe) after new model was released

Posted on Apr 12, 2010 5:40 AM

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244 replies

Apr 12, 2010 6:01 AM in response to Ryzl1987

When this happened to my pro, the Genius tech at the Apple Store found I needed a new logic board.

The way I worked around this, before taking it to the Genius, was I did not put my pro to sleep, and shut it down instead of closing the lid. But in hind sight, (which is always 20/20), I think I should have taken it sooner. It only took the tech about 2 or 3 days to repair, since they had to order the part for my pro.

Apr 12, 2010 6:52 AM in response to Ryzl1987

For only the last week, my MBP has sometimes been only waking as far as a black, backlit screen. I can't tell any circumstances that cause it. Only holding down Power to force shutdown fixes it.

I've already uninstalled SmartSleep and Caffeine, and deleted/recreated my Power Management plist in search of a fix, but that didn't seem to do anything. I don't believe I've made any software installs in the last week, either.

I typically leave the MBP open on my desk overnight and during parts of the day, so this is occurring without any hinge/magnet/sensor involvement.

In the Console, I can always find this afterward:

4/12/10 9:32:29 AM configd[15]
Wake: Drivers Failure - AC 99 - OHC2 HDEF GIGE SATA RP01 IXVE
com.apple.message.domain: com.apple.powermanagement.wake
com.apple.message.signature: Drivers Failure
com.apple.message.result: Failure

Apr 12, 2010 7:06 AM in response to Yera Meyahu

I'm seeing the same issue, seemingly just post 10.6.3. I'll often close my lid at night, and the hibernation light pulses as it should. However, lately the MBP is not waking up when I open the lid. The hibernation light goes off, but the screen stays black. If I close the lid, the light comes back on, and stays steady. It happened this morning, and I happened to look at the screen from the bottom side up--and I could make out remnants of the screensaver still on the screen, but frozen. All that fixed it was a hard reboot.

I thought this could be a Parallels problem, in that the Win7 instance was hanging up the system. However, it happened this weekend with Parallels shut down.

I just reset my System Management Controller this morning to see if that has any effect. I am hoping that this is not a hardware failure in progress.

Any other ideas for diagnosis would be appreciated.

Apr 14, 2010 3:14 PM in response to DylanRhea

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.

Reset SMC this morning, on hour 4 of battery calibration (separate issue), and will zap the PRAM ASAP and report back. Hopefully, it isn't hardware failure for either of us!

-K

Apr 16, 2010 8:23 AM in response to Ryzl1987

I have exactly the same issue with my MacBook pro - after it already came back from Apple tech support who had to replace the hard drive for a different issue.
Recently after sleeping it doesn't want to wake up. It's just frozen with the screen either on or completely blank leaving me no option but to power off and start up again. Very annoying.
I do not want to have to take this machine back to Apple but I've had nothing but problems with it.

Apr 16, 2010 8:41 AM in response to Yera Meyahu

Mine has not showed this behavior in a couple of days now--also very unscientific fixes. Did the PRAM reset and reset the interal controller. Ran all Onyx processes and did some other cleanup. Not sure what has helped, but at least it is not freezing at the moment. It does look like a 10.6.3 specific behavior, as I never saw this prior to the update.

Cross your fingers, as I am also hoping that this is not a hardware bug or failure.

Apr 19, 2010 10:03 PM in response to Ryzl1987

I've been having similar problems. I usually keep an external monitor plugged in and for me the symptoms are that the external monitor displays the screen as it was before I went to sleep but the laptop screen stays black no matter what. My USB mouse has a light on it which turns on, but the computer is totally unresponsive.

Very frustrating and I've only noticed this since 10.6.3. To me it seems unlikely that we all suddenly developed logic board problems.

I also feel there is some connection to what I have plugged in, and I actually had a suspicion at one point that it had to do with having a USB cable plugged in on the computer end with nothing plugged in on the other end. But the behaviour isn't consistent.

Apr 20, 2010 7:01 AM in response to The Kwamster

Heh. The good news is we're all getting the same error, but the bad news is it's not very specific. I don't know much, but I wouldn't assume it's a logic board (or other hardware) error, especially because I'm also seeing a 10.6.3-related consensus?

Is there anyone with the expertise to explain the Drivers Failure error, and possibly suggest other details to look for?

I reenabled 'Require Password on Sleep/Screensaver' and kept 'Use Secure Virtual Memory' off, still no recurrence of the problem.

Apr 20, 2010 7:07 AM in response to Ryzl1987

i'm getting a similar problem on my MBP, but mine is completely unresponsive now. it will sound like it is waking up when i open the monitor, but no keys are responsive and the screen is black. when i force power off by holding the off key, it will shut down, but when i try to restart it (even after hours of being off), it will resort back to the frozen black screen with unresponsive keys.

any suggestions to get it functional again? my wife has a huge research paper on there that we need to recover!

thanks in advance.

MBP often won't wake after sleep.

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