After installing mavericks, the iMac will not wake from sleep properly (at all)

Here's my latest: I adjusted the power saver preferences to "never" put the hard disk to sleep, and to put the display to sleep at 3 hours. After doing this, the iMAC has been woken fine the last two mornings (started failing to wake 1 month ago while running Lion, problem continued after upgrading to Mavericks.)

Any thoughts on this? Does it rule out a heat or power supply issue? Also curious if it is bad not to allow the hard disk to sleep? I'm assuming Apple would not allow that option in the settings if it could be harmful to the computer?

I just wanted to post an update on this, which I hope is of interest.

After my original post on this topic (a while ago) I've been watching what everyone's been saying and changing various settings back and forth over the weeks. Ultimately, without changing settings so that my iMac never slept, I had come to the conclusion that it would take a revision of the OS to sort it out. Although there have been one or two suggestions that it might not be the OS, the coincidence of problem and installation of Mavericks just seems too great and too frequent for it not to be (at least related to) Mavericks.

Now, lo and behold, things seem to have been back to normal ever since I did the recent OSX upgrade to v 10.9.2. I've had no incidences of failure to wake properly from sleep. Now I'm fairly sure that others have not seen an improvement/solution after installing 10.9.2, but perhaps others have or may be encouraged now to try the upgrade in hope because it still seems to me that the issue has to be OS related in some way and so far in my case at least installing 10.9.2 seems to have done the trick somehow.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the problem doesn't return, but I'm 2 weeks on now, so maybe ...

When I unplug the monitor cable at my mac mini and plug it back in while the computer is powered on I get the login screen back.

I think this is a problem with detecting the power state of the monitor. I am using a non-Apple monitor.

It would be nice to get a response from Apple support on this thread.

Just so Appple knows, I am having this exact same problem. Running OS 10.9.2 on an iMac 2.8 GHz Core i5.

never had this problem untill forced to install Mverics ... 10.9.2 1yr old desktop now when computer goes to sleep i can not get it to wake up. Have to to a hard reboot

turned off all "go to sleep" settings as in set all to "never" now it wakes up at least ....

Mate if it's related to when your Mac sleeps for a long period of time then proceeds to crash it is related to to 3rd party security software i.e. Banking security or anti virus software. In my case I had installed some software called Trusteer Rapport, and as with many other people, as soon as we uninstalled this software the crashing whilst sleeping for a long periods of time simply disappeared.

ginther that is consistent with what I have been seeing.

Question - if you set only Computer sleep to Never and leave the default settings for Display sleep and Put hard disks to sleep when possible, do you still avoid the wake problem?

In my case that setup has been working. The reason I like it is that it seems to minimize the adverse impacts. The display(s) seem to generate most of the heat, Reducing the hours on the illuminastion soyrces seems like it would be a plus too.

BobHassinger yes, if i leave the display to a 15 minute sleep still it will wake up. Thanks. Problem seems to be with mav and computer sleep setting. This prob only seems to be an issue on my desktop ... 2x2.4 6-Core Xeon, 28g ram 1 of 2 5770 video cards atm

I updated my apple laptop as well to 10.9.2 ( 2.4 i7) but it does not have this issue ....

I can't say this with certainty, but my sense is that the problem may be more connected to combinations of different applications and activities than it is to specific computer models. That gets difficult to assess, because there may be more than one problem that come together in this discussion thread because they all manifest with a similar symptom and people with any of them land in this tread when they come searching for that symptom of not waking.

In this case it may be that there are different applications active on the two computers, or that background and overnight activities are different. There is a lot that can go on even when the computer is asleep, particularly if it is connected to the Internet.

Ok then let me add this, I just purchased a:

21.5-inch: 2.7GHz iMac

• 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5
• Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz
• 8GB (two 4GB) memory ( I upgraded the ram to 16GB)
• 1TB hard drive¹
• Intel Iris Pro graphics

I received the machine March 21, 2014. After setting it all up the first thing I did was download all the updates available. I figured I would let it do it's updates while I did something else. I had set the screen saver to display album covers and then after 10 min the display goes to sleep this is my normal set up with all Macs I have owned. After about 45min to1hour I hit the space bar to wake it just to see how the updates were doing when I encountered my first crash:

First Crash: March 21, 2014 - When waking it up from sleep I had a black screen, my desktop was gone, no matter what I pressed on the keyboard I could not get a display. I had to hard boot the system to get back in. Once it came back up it was working normally.

Second Crash: March 22, 2014 - While streaming movies to my apple TV, the movie just stopped abruptly and I got the message to turn iTunes sharing back on. Once again after hitting the space bar to wake it, this time my desktop did come up. I thought I would just restart iTunes but it was not responding, trying to open more application I found it was all unresponsive. My mouse was moving around, I can click on applications, I get only one bounce from the icon but no applications opened, however with Mail once getting to that icon and clicking it...the application opened then closed super quick as it just flashed in front of my eye's then never opened again. Force quit did not work at all. The more I clicked around the more unresponsive it got. Finally I had to hard boot to get back in. Once I did all application were working and I was able to continue streaming the movie to my apple TV.

Third Crash: March 23, 2014 - edited some video clips, synced my phone then streamed some shows to my apple TV again, As normal the screen saver came up displaying the album covers and eventually the screen turned off. After the movie I went to eject my phone from iTunes and I got the beach ball. It was constant. I waited about 2 min to see if the beach ball would disappear but it did not. Once again I tried to open other applications and the same thing happed as the second crash. It all became unresponsive however this time though it didn't crash my stream to the apple tv, but once again I had to hard boot to get back into my computer.

So I'm going to call support when I get home tonight as I couldn't do this yesterday because the last crash happend late last night. I'm thinking I may have to return the machine and hopfully they can ship another in decent time.

BTW: I have swtich to this new iMac from a 15"Macbook pro that I upgraded to Mavricks and I haven't had one issue with. Mavricks cam pre-installed with the new iMac. So do any of you think it's hardware? If you were me would you demand a new machin be shipped? This is all so very frustrating as all I want to do is start working on my projects but everying is on hold until I can get this resolved.

I hope I posted this in the right place.

I have bad news, all. The "sleep" trick (System Preferences > Energy Saver > Power Adapter > Computer Sleep > Never) works, but also may have contributed to my hard drive crashing on Friday night. I cannot say for sure, but if my MBP was asleep, the fan would not have been running at full blast and the computer wouldn't have been extremely hot. It also should be noted that my MBP is 7 years old and was on the original hard drive.

Over the weekend, I had to get a new hard drive, do a clean install of Mavericks (via: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-create-a-bootable-os-x-mavericks-usb-install-d rive/), and restore from a Time Machine backup.

The good news is that the sleep problem is gone after the clean install.

Just be forewarned that not allowing the computer to sleep could lead to catastrophic problems as seems to have happened in my case. It appears as though some file somewhere is getting corrupted during some installs of Mavericks. Probably best to do a clean install (read: format and install from a bootable usb, not a re-install over already existing Mavericks) to correct any damaged system files.

Good luck.

Chaps and chapesses can I just mention that I too had been dealing with a sleep crash problem since I got my brand new rMBP in November 2013. After masses of testing and Console message analysis I eventually figured out what was causing it, in my case it was some banking security software called 'Trusteer Rapport' and other people it has been certain anti-virus type security software.

Basically when I put my rMBP to sleep for the night, come morning it had crashed and was absolutely dead until I held down the power button for 10 seconds to do a hard shutdown then re-boot. My laptop would be warm and the battery would have been almost completely drained from being at 100% when I put it to sleep.

Anyway as with other on here, once I had fully uninstalled 'Trusteer Report' banking software my rMBP hasn't crashed during sleep a single time in 2 weeks of sleeping every night, compared to before when I would have at least 2 or 3 crashes each week.

Thought I'd share this article and more importantly the comments to article, especially the comment I've pasted below the link...FYI, since I changed my system preferences - energy saver by unchecking 'put hard disk to sleep' and just checking 'put display to sleep' my iMAC is no longer having "failure to wake/reboot problems" in the morning. I've been involved on two Apple forum threads and it's a widespread problem on both PowerBooks and iMACs running Lion or Mavericks. Still an OS bug that Apple needs to fix, but in the meantime this is interesting read on theories of shutting down vs sleep vs just putting display to sleep and not hard disks. I saw no mention in the article of potential harming hard drive :

http://osxdaily.com/2012/04/10/shutdown-sleep-or-leave-mac-turned-on/

I would like to point something out about your posting today with regards to shutdown, sleep, or leaving a mac running. In my experience as a systems administrator over the past 15 years, and with having to regularly service and maintain thousands of machines, I have made and discussed with others the following observations. While your logic for complete shutdown and sleep is valid, I must disagree about the pros and cons section of the leaving the system on. First, one of the most intense uses of a hard drive is the powering on and off. Most hard drive failures occur not from consistent usage, but from excessive power cycles or reboots. When you sleep the system, you also stop the drive from spinning. Mechanically, this will shorten the life of the drive more than having it powered on and spinning constantly. This one reason more than any other is the main reason I leave my system powered on. Next, with regards to heat and other component usage – the best thing for this is actually simply sleeping the display. This is especially true for the iMac, since the heat of the display is so closely intertwined with the rest of the components. Since the headline photo attached to this story is an iMac, I think it’s worth noting. I believe a solid case can be made that if you use your Mac on a daily basis, you can achieve better longevity from leaving the system powered on and the display asleep when not in use. Sleep the system if gone for say, a weekend. Power the system off if gone for a long term. The main things you have to worry about failing in a computer are the mechanical items… the moving parts. Hard drive first, Fans next, and then anything that relies on the fans for cooling. If you keep the drive spinning, and you keep dust and other particulates out of the air intakes – you can achieve the best overall longevity from having the system stay energized and reduce the number of startups, either hard (from shutdown) or soft (from sleep). I also readily admit that I don’t care at all about how much energy my system uses since when I’m not at the keyboard driving it, the cost and energy usage is pretty trivial. Though for the hard core energy conscious, sleeping may be the best idea. It just depends on what you may be running on your system that you want to keep available for service, or how environmentally conscious you wish to be. Anyway, thanks for discussing this topic.

Update to my original post:

The freezing is now happeining even if the iMac is not in sleep mode. Same symtoms. My mouse can move...but my applications are non repsonsive. The beach ball spins till eternity. Only a hardboot brings it back to normal.

This is truely torrment as my iMac is only 8days old and I can't really commit to it or do any real work on it because I don't know yet if an OS reinstall needs to be done or if I have to ship it back for a new one.

An apple tech will be contacting me tonight at 8am for more testing.

Hi All,

First post here but thought it may assist those with the same ongoing problem.

I have a 2010 iMac and was reading about all the benefits of upgrading to Mavericks rather than staying with the now unsupported Snow Leopard. So a couple of weeks ago I pressed the upgrade button and installed 10.9.2 onto my machine.

All was well for a while and then after around 5 days I had the same issue of the iMac not waking from sleep. This became so frustrating for me having tried all the good tips and advice on here (that didn't work in my case) - I started the process of re-installing 10.6.8 back onto my iMac.

Having manually backed up all of the system and reformatted my HDD to suit, I then read somewhere (on this thread I think) that a fresh install of 10.9.2 may make a difference. So before going backwards, I tried a fresh new install using Mavericks on a boot USB key that I made.

Despite being long winded to get everything up an running again (A 10.9.2 Time Machine not being backwards compatible with 10.6.8 apparently) I have now have a new fresh and clean install on my iMac - and touch wood there have been no more instances of my iMac not waking from sleep. In fact I would go as far to say the the waking up process seems much quicker than it used to be as well as the iMac feeling new again.

Anyhow, I just thought this feedback may help some others out.