iMac with Lion not waking after overnight sleep

Just reading through all of this. Of all you folks having this issue, how many are running a TimeMachine backup? I ask because I am having this problem now for the last 3 days. Bought a new 21.5" with Lion installed back in December. Everything was absolutley fine. Then about end of February I developed the "wifi" issue coming out of sleep. Fought with it and then installed the "patch" when it came out. Things were fine again. Then middle of this week, the machine would just "sleep" and not wake up. Had to power it down the hard way and then things came back on. It was today that I started thinking it was somehow related to TimeMachine. When I had the wifi "issue" I had turned it off. Just turned it on beginning of this week. I have since turned it off and will see what happens tomorrow, but I am thinking it is tied to it. TimeMachine, at least for me, has been a PITA. I am actually going to wipe the drive and start over manually if my machine wakes up tomorrow. Just thought I would ask. Regards, Joel

Hi Joel,

I am not using Time machine personally, but maybe the symptom is caused by differing reasons although i doubt it, as stated before there is nothing plugged into our Imac & nothing has been installed since Lion, not waking up from sleep has happened twice to us ( since Lion ) & never before, i installed Lion onto my Mac Pro at the same time & i have multiple hard drives etc plugged into that machine & so far no problems. I assume that with future updates the sleep issue will just go away, well hopefully ! Good luck !

M

Adding to the list of people experiencing this problem! I have done everything suggested down to a clean Lion install. Also made sure I did a manual restore of my data to avoid bringing corrupt settings files across. FInally, Apple Care replaced my iMac's motherboard and bluetooth model. All this failed to fix the problem. Like everyone else it occurs in "waves". I have a bug report open with Apple for a few months now and have supplied them with lots of dumps etc. However, I have had not one bit of feedback from them as to whether or not they understand the problem let alone can fix it.

I agree with your waves comment. For instance, this week every morning locked up after over 2 weeks of perfect operation.

What's the bet we will have to wait for mountain lion for a fix.

Having the same issues on my iMac - any resolution or comment from Apple?

They said they were investigating and that my information was helpful. So that is hopeful. However, these sorts of problems are difficult to isolate since everyone seems to have the same symptom but triggered in many different ways and to varying degrees of frequency. I haven't had the freeze for a week or so now so I am feeling magnanimous :-)

Hello,

I had this problem quite a while ago and researched the problem extensively. I believe the root cause of the problem for me is related to sleeping hard disk drives. In my case, I had to disable "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver preferences.

I was hoping that an OS update would correct the problem. I attempted to enable the preference a couple weeks ago after installing 10.7.4 and the sleep problem started again. It caused severe corruption of the system disk that required a recovery boot and disk repair. I disabled the preference and the problem has not recurred. My conclusion is that this problem has not been resolved.

Note, as I recall I had this problem with both 10.6 and 10.7.

No longer feeling magnanimous regarding this problem. Just had two crashes in the lst couple of days! Don't know what changed to cause this issue to re-emerge. Have stopped recommending iMacs to any of my friends who ask what they should buy. I know Windows machines can be just as unreliable but previously I would be confident that the Mac would provide a more stable experience - not any more.

Hi Gratullin,

I have had good long term success with disabling sleeping disks. Though not ideal it appears to be a work around of the probem for me. The consequence is that i have noisy external disks spinning constantly. One of them is a drive where the power supply burns out after about a year so i prefer to sleep this drive. Thus, i would like to see a proper fix for this problem

Please try my suggested work around and let me know how things go.

Regarding your recommending Macs, i appreciate (and share) your frustration. All things considered, I still believe the Mac to be the more stable platform and continue to recommend it. Though, this type of problem is a huge withdrawal from the mac emotional bank account. I hope Tim Cook reads this.

Steve

Steve,

Yes. I immediately tried your suggestion from your previous post. Will provide feedback if/when I get the next hang.

Cheers, Andrew

PS. Recommending Macs again today :-))

Hung again this morning even with disabled sleeping disks. Very disappointed with my iMac experience.

On top of that I had the misfortune to try and use the new iOS Podcast app - what a mess! And don't get me started on iCloud calendar syncing with MS Outlook :-)

Hmmm. I'll think a bit about the sleep problem some more. I vaguely remember cleaning out some system caches at one time. You need to remove some files a certain way but I cannot clearly remember where they are and the instructions to do so. You cannot remove the caches while running from the system disk so you need to boot another way. I do not recall if this was related in any way to fixing my problem but I do recall when I found the message thread that the author suggested this was necessary because some changes needed to be flushed from the cache.

Haven't tried the Podcast app. Thanks for the heads up. I'll wait for a version that does not end with zero.

Regarding iCloud syncing ... In this day and age I cannot understand why calendar and contact syncing is still a problem, sheez. I would like to see iCloud sync directly with Exchange and Google (ie: from cloud server to cloud server). This would be calendar and contact nirvana!

Hey Steve, Gratullin,

I have a few posts regarding this issue. Same results as Gratullin. I disabled sleeping disks and it hung last night.

Very disappointed also. I bought my mac in late 2009. It's been GREAT. but this "won't turn on from sleep" issue occurred after the upgrade to lion. And won't go away. Never had an issue before the upgrade. Did I tell you how great my IMac was before the upgrade? :-)

Even with this issue, I simply shut down before I go to bed or if I know it won't be used for a few hours. Wish there was a fix. It has to be a bug in the OS somewhere..

Disabling disk sleeping is not the solution and do not help.

When You put Your iMac in to sleep mode, disks will shutdown anyway.

Only solution is what I told to people, who have the problem with iMac + Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, is what I quided to do in the starts of this topic.

Problem is with the Bluetooth Daemon on the OS X. You need to put Bluetooth Daemon to restart itself via crontab. When BT Daemon restart itself, reconnection with the keyboard and mouse happen.

After I did Bluetooth Daemon restart to crontab (every 5 minutes), I have had no problems with the keyboard and mouse.

Please, look at the start of the topic.

I had a 24" iMac (2007 model I think) that was running Snow Leopard and it had the sleeping problem. I vaguely remember sometime around 10.6.4 the problem was finally resolved. I seem to recall that when I upgraded to Lion is when the problem resurfaced for me. I tracked it down to the sleeping disk in my case. It bugged the heck out of me that I had to ensure my computer never slept. I'm not an eco freak but wasting all that energy because of a bug simply does not compute. Seems to me Apple could make a bigger impact on the environment fixing this problem than investing in fuel cells, solar, etc. ;-)

Anyway, it causes me to pause an wonder if a problem that was fixed in Snow Leopard resurfaced in Lion.