hibernate crashes with low battery, SSD and 8 GB RAM

Question

Level 1

6 points

hibernate crashes with low battery, SSD and 8 GB RAM

Hi,

I have a problem with the hibernation mode when my computer runs out of battery. My suspicion is that the power that is reserved for hibernation is not sufficient to store the complete contend of the RAM. As a result the system cannot resume from the image that was saved to the hard disk and reboots.

I described the problem here, but got no replies:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12282444#12282444

I try to get more precise here. I have a SSD disk (APPLE SSD TS512B) and 8 GB RAM (1067 Mhz and DDR3). The RAM is almost completely filled, when the problem arises (there is no problem when the RAM contains just 1 GB or 2 GB).

reserved 5,23 GB
active 1,80 GB
free 178 MB
used 7,83 GB

I tried to hibernate the disk (while connected to power). This takes 58 seconds. I guess the battery power that is left when the system forces the computer to hibernate is not sufficient to store everything on the disk. The LED goes dark after the hibernation immediately. That is, there is no blinking that usually indicates the sleep mode. The machine is just off. When I connect it to the power and switch it on again, it tries to resume, hangs for a while and then reboots.

As I said in the other post: a technician from an apple partner checked all the hardware (for more than a week ...). Everything is ok, including battery. I calibrated the battery several times (most of the time with the crashes described above). The software is up to date.

Can this problem be replicated? Is there any hope for a software fix?

Thanks and greetings

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Sep 20, 2010 1:21 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 20, 2010 3:45 AM in response to stmue

Don't run your battery down to the point where it is dead. That is not good for the battery.
Does it work properly if you put it into hibernation when there is still 20% left on the battery?

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Answer 2

stmue Author

Level 1

6 points

Sep 20, 2010 4:38 AM in response to Retired Engineer

Don't run your battery down to the point where it is dead.

I only did this to calibrate the battery. The howto said so.

Does it work properly if you put it into hibernation when there is still 20% left on the battery?

Thanks for asking this question. I never tried this before. I now tried hibernation with power connected. And the same problem arises: When I try to resume, the system hangs and then reboots.

So I guess it is a general problem of hibernation that has nothing todo with the battery.

What can I do?

I migrated the system from a 10.4 MacBook Pro, but the technician installed a fresh OS X on top of my installation, to make sure that there is no OS related problem.

Thanks for the help!

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Answer 3

blee4

Level 1

14 points

Dec 2, 2010 11:25 AM in response to stmue

I've been Googling for a few hours now and I've come across several forums that have similar topics. I recently bought 2 OWC SSD drives. You mentioned hibernate (wake machine from sleep screen is grey and there's a progress bar indication that OS X is loading your last session back into memory) I've experience the problem in both hibernate and wake from sleep.

When my machine goes to sleep and I wake it, I start using the machine maybe for about 30 seconds to a minute the whole machine then freezes sometimes with the exception of the cursor but the time is frozen and the blinking time separator : doesn't blink you can't click on any icons.

Only option is to hard reset. Sometimes the cursor is a spinning beach ball.

Some people have stated to turn off hibernate mode "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0" I tried this about an hour ago haven't tested it yet by putting my MBP to sleep. But I'll post my results.

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Answer 4

Toocool4

Level 2

365 points

Dec 2, 2010 12:30 PM in response to blee4

I have to admit today is the first time I’ve had this problem.

I have an OWC SSD in my MacBook Pro.

I have no problem putting the Mac to sleep and waking it up. Yesterday I left my power supply at work so I thought I’ll run the battery down so I can re-calibrate the battery. Anyway I did run it down and let it hibernate. Today after charging it fully I re-started it, the progress bar came up but it crashed before the end. I did not think too much of it. This is the first time I’ve let the battery run down since installing the SSD.

I will try it again next time I need to re-calibrate.

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Answer 5

guzman

Level 1

0 points

Dec 4, 2010 8:09 AM in response to Toocool4

I have the same problem here. I have a late 2009 macbook pro, with a SSD Crucial M225 in it (CRUCIAL_CT256M225, 256 Go) and 4 Go RAM. Before I installed the SSD, it always came back fine from hibernation. But from the moment the SSD was in the Macbook, it always freeze during the progression bar in the grey screen.
Before the SSD, I had the classic hard drive from Apple (5400 t/min).
I've tried the DeepSleep ( http://deepsleep.free.fr/) widget to force hibernation and all went well, no freeze, it came back well from hibernation.

Hope someone find the reason, and maybe a solution...

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