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

I have also noticed that my USB devices do not always wake up properly even if the iMac does - the amount of times I have woken up my Mac and it wakes up correctly but then I cannot use a USB device or items attached to a powered hub - almost like the iMac forgets to tell the USB devices or Hub to wake up as well - it is so annoying as you either have to unplug and re-plug devices in or you have to perform a full reboot which then makes it pointless putting the iMac to sleep in the first place - Daymn Apple sort this out soon otherwise I will end up rolling back to M-Lion!

Thank you SOO much this worked great for me !! i changed SSD's  completely wiped and reinstalled Mavricks, Mountain Lion and Lion and Snow leppord but couldnt fix this **** thing sin e i installed mavricks. Followed all of these steps below and worked lieka charm. even "Geniouses" are stuppid completely useless and waste of time and money for real problems.

follow this if you want to fix it

As per the instructions received,

First thing I did was reset the SMC;

• Shut down the computer.
• Unplug the computer's power cord.
• Wait fifteen seconds.
• Attach the computer's power cord.
• Wait five seconds, then press the power button to turn on the computer.

This was then followed by resetting the NVRAM/PRAM;

• Shut down your Mac.
• Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
• Turn on the computer.
• Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
• Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
• Release the keys.

After this step, I verified disc permissions;

• Disc Utility
• select my main Mac HD
• Click on 'verify disc permissions'
• then, when done, click on 'repair disc permissions'

Finally, I started in safeboot mode;

• Shut down the iMac
• Restart, holding the Shift key until I saw a loading/progress bar.
• After starting up, did a regular restart.

Has anyone trying reverting to ML or an older OS?  If so did that solve the issue?

I'm working on a 21" iMac (2007) for a client where the hard drive died.  I replaced it and installed a new drive plus a fresh copy of Mavericks, it started have this freezing problem immediately after going to sleep.  I assumed it was a video card issue on top of the bad hard drive.  But Apple's hardware test came back clean.  Even though this was a clean install of 10.9 I rest the SMC, the NVRAM/PRAM, repair the permissions, and booted in to safe mode.  I have it booted up normal now and reset the energy saver setting.  I'll report back and see if this fixes it.  If not I try installing 10.8 and see how that works.

That sounds like a very promising test that you are doing.  Let us know what you find.  I assume when you say you reset the Energy settings you mean putting them back to the sleep defaults.

And if you do still have the wake failure then a test with 10.8 under those same clean conditions would be REALY interesting.

The computer is waking from sleep perfect now.  I'm still a little leary to consider it a sucess yet since fearull and others had sucess and then problems come back several days later...

I have Mavericks running on my personal  iMac 27" (2011) and MBA (2011) with no issues.

Yes, my experience has been that sometimes I will go back to the default sleep settings and it may seem OK for days before failing, and other times it can be a short time until it does not wake - sometimes as soon as the very next time it sleeps.

BTW - note that there could be a chance for differences between laptops and desktop systems.  I think certain settings or defaults may be different under the hood for the case where AC power is always there vs. machines with batteries.  I think I noted something when I looked at the documentation for the pmset hibernatemode manipulation that some have posted about.

Although my issue was slightly different (MacBook Pro would need a restart after going to sleep with Thunderbolt Display and only after being disconnected), a software (kernel extension) conflict was the root cause of the awakening issue. I used safe boot to confirm that it was an issue with my content (safe boot and a dull known good OS on an external hard drive both worked as expected). I read here about EntreCheck which proved to be very useful in helping me systematically identify those things to remove (with an uninstaller) that needed to be removed.

As it turned out, this was an extension I implemented with a VPN client back in 2008 (about three Macs ago), but never uninstalled until yesterday.

I wonder if there are others with hidden software conflicts, that end up making Mavericks run so poorly.

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I've got a mid-2012 MacBook Pro. I installed Mavericks a month ago and now, on occasion, it takes over 3 minutes to wake. It doesn't do it every time, and I can't find a recurring commonality to the times it fails.

Been following this forum; thanks everybody for your posts.

Today I: 1. Reset SMC,  2. Reset NVRAM,  3. Verified permissions (there were many differing permissions) and repaired them.

I'm hoping this will work. More than anything I'm hoping Apple will give a **** about this issue and do something about it.

In addition to the above I opened Energy Saver and unchecked "Put hard disks to sleep when possible".

The above 3 steps and this 4th step seems to have worked in my case after testing.

I doubt that the SMC reset had anything to do with it as it was the 2nd time I had tried it to no luck.

I've tested this over a couple of days now and it seems to have fixed the problem; at least in my case, mid 2012 MacBook Pro installing Mavericks.

1. Reset SMC

2. Reset NVRAM

3. Verify and repair permissions

4. Edit Energy Saver and uncheck "Put hard disks to sleep when possible"

We'll I installed 10.9.1 tonight, then restored factory setting on energy savings.. I has awakened a couple of times as it once did on 10.6.8.  There was nothing in the release notes about correcting the sleep/wake issue that I noticed.

I will give to a shot over night and see what the morning brings.

Worked like a charm this morning after being on default Energy Saver settings (iMac late 2009 model 10,1) with a fair amount of third party software.

Hit the space bar, entered the password; the first time the wake worked flawlessly on Mavericks!

I am hopeful this issue has been resolved in 10.9.1.

Not a diagnosis but a way to avoid reformatting, etc.

I was able to escape from the "won't boot no matter what I try" scenario by inserting an old OS X install disk and pressing the start key.  This took the boot through a different path that by-passed the issue. 

The system came up with numerous diagnostics about Sleep Mode Restart (no surpise there) and a dump sent to Apple.  I have turned off sleep mode until Apple gets its act together.

Hope this helps

Maverick OSX 10.9.1. 

I have tried everything I can think of to break the sleep \ wake function in the last two days. It is still working as it should for me. (fingers crossed).

I tried every suggestion on this discussion, some more than once; Reset SMC, Reset NVRAM, Verify and repair permissions for example. However the sleep/wake function has never worked this well until 10.9.1.

I certainly don't know what combination of steps contributed to this result, I just hope it continues

I will continue with the Energy Saver Default settings.

When you said you installed 10.9.1 - was that as a clean install, or was it as an update to a prior version?