Vincent van der Laan

Q: When in sleep mode waking my Mac Pro restarts it

Hi everybody, best wishes for the new year!

 

My Mac Pro (2.8 GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon from 2009) suddenly (last 2 weeks) started having issues in Sleep Mode.

 

I put the mac to sleep and it goes to sleep normally after about 20-30 seconds.

 

1. When I try to wake it up by hitting the keyboard or moving the mouse I hear lots of hard drive activity

(it contains 1 SSD drive with system and apps and 2 normal harddrives for data) and then I hear the restart tune and I get a hard restart (just like pressing the power button for several seconds). Apps that were running are terminated so after the restart I get lots of errors about "apps not closed properly".

 

2. Often the Mac restarts itself when in sleep mode.

 

I tried repairing privileges and running the cron scripts, but no luck so far.


Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), 128 GB SSD 10 GB RAM

Posted on Jan 5, 2016 7:04 AM

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Q: When in sleep mode waking my Mac Pro restarts it

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  • by Linc Davis,

    Linc Davis Linc Davis Jan 5, 2016 9:30 AM in response to Vincent van der Laan
    Level 10 (208,000 points)
    Applications
    Jan 5, 2016 9:30 AM in response to Vincent van der Laan

    These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

    Please launch the Console application in any one of the following ways:

    ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

    ☞ In the Finder, select Go Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

    ☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

    In the Console window, select

              DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION System Diagnostic Reports

    (not Diagnostic and Usage Messages) from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

              View Show Log List

    from the menu bar.

    There is a disclosure triangle to the left of the list item. If the triangle is pointing to the right, click it so that it points down. You'll see a list of reports. A panic report has a name that begins with "Kernel" and ends in ".panic". Select the most recent one. The contents of the report will appear on the right. Use copy and paste to post the entire contents—the text, not a screenshot.

    If you don't see any reports listed, but you know there was a panic, you may have chosen Diagnostic and Usage Messages from the log list. Choose DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION instead.

    In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)

    Please don’t post other kinds of diagnostic report.

    I know the report is long, maybe several hundred lines. Please post all of it anyway.

    When you post the report, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

    If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.

  • by Vincent van der Laan,

    Vincent van der Laan Vincent van der Laan Jan 5, 2016 1:13 PM in response to Linc Davis
    Level 1 (115 points)
    Jan 5, 2016 1:13 PM in response to Linc Davis

    Thank you very much for replying, Linc Davis!

     

    However I found the problem by checking "About this Mac": I suddenly seem to have only 2GB of RAM instead of 10GB.

    On the top riser I have two 1GB DIMMs which work fine.

    On the bottom riser are two 4 GB DIMMs. On the bottom riser a red LED is burning indicating a RAM problem.

     

    Apparently one DIMM or both are dead.

    Taking care to avoid static electricity I took them out of their slots and and put them back in again several times to see if there were any contact problems, but this didn't help. I also swapped them, didn't work either.

    Removing the faulty DIMMs solved my sleep problem: the Mac wakes up to the previous state without restarting.

     

    My question now has changed to:

    1. are both DIMMs dead or only one?

    2. if only one is dead how do I determine which one is dead?

     

    (and: how on earth does RAM die anyway, since there are no moving parts to wear down and there can't be any static electricity within the Mac Pro enclosure???)

  • by Vincent van der Laan,

    Vincent van der Laan Vincent van der Laan Jan 5, 2016 1:58 PM in response to Vincent van der Laan
    Level 1 (115 points)
    Jan 5, 2016 1:58 PM in response to Vincent van der Laan

    OK, found out that the red LED points out the defective DIMM, so now I know which one is dead.

    Apparently the other one which is OK does not show up in "About this Mac", interesting, but kind of worrying too...

     

    Do they only show up when both DIMMs are fine?

  • by Linc Davis,

    Linc Davis Linc Davis Jan 5, 2016 2:52 PM in response to Vincent van der Laan
    Level 10 (208,000 points)
    Applications
    Jan 5, 2016 2:52 PM in response to Vincent van der Laan

    I suggest that you replace the known-bad DIMM and see whether there's an improvement.