Why does my MacBook sometimes restart when I close the lid for sleep time?

August 4, 2007 11:10 PM

Why does my MacBook occasionally restart when I close the lid to have it go to sleep? This MacBook is only a couple months old (the latest MacBook revision) running 10.4.10. It's very sporadic. I will close the machine, then, after a few seconds, I hear the Mac startup chime. Here, though, it pauses the startup routine. Then I open the lid and it finishes booting. Any thoughts?
posted by jroybal to computers & internet (16 comments total)

wow...i've been having this exact problem and i thought maybe i was just doing something wrong...

no help here, but it's not only you...
posted by PinkButterfly at 11:12 PM on August 4, 2007

this happens to mine too. it also awakens me when i'm sleeping, whirring away over in the corner of my room.

mine's old--an iBook.

i anxiously await the answers that will come your way.
posted by RedEmma at 11:16 PM on August 4, 2007

Do you have access to an external Firewire drive, or a friend with an external FW drive?

You could install Mac OS X on that drive, boot from it (hold down the Alt key on startup), and see if the laptop reboots on sleep.

If it doesn't reboot on sleep when booted from the external drive, you probably have bad Energy Saver settings. Use the Terminal or a tool like Tiger Cache Cleaner to reset Energy Saver settings.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:25 PM on August 4, 2007

(also anxiously awaiting)
posted by lalex at 11:34 PM on August 4, 2007

Perhaps the machine is crashing while attempting a "safe sleep" - which triggers an auto-reboot followed by the machine attempting "safe sleep" again after enough of the OS starts back up to detect that the lid is closed. As an experiment, you could try disabling safe sleep and seeing if the problem goes away.

Also, out of curiosity, are you using secure virtual memory? It can interact with safe sleep.
posted by RichardP at 12:35 AM on August 5, 2007

I had an issue with my Macbook waking up all the time at night - realised it was because I had a cheap mouse plugged in that kept sending it 'Wake up!' signals.

I also have the occasional crash on closing the lid issue - no idea what causes it, frankly.
posted by Happy Dave at 1:51 AM on August 5, 2007

Me too. AAA (anxiously awaiting answer).
posted by unclejeffy at 5:13 AM on August 5, 2007

My Dell Inspiron does this. I have figured out that the cpu is loose. Try twisting and pressing the computer to reproduce the restart.
posted by JohnR at 6:43 AM on August 5, 2007

This exact thing used to happen to me. Here's the problem: to preserve your data in case of battery failure, your MacBook copies data in memory to your hard disk. This is a new feature, and it's called Safe Sleep. If you disturb the process - especially by moving the computer and hard drive - the computer will lose consciousness and restart.

You could check out Daring Fireball's article from this Friday for a solution. Or, just give your MacBook a minute to process before you move it. The latter is a much easier solution, and it worked for me.
posted by Sfving at 7:00 AM on August 5, 2007

The problem lies in a new Mac OS X feature called safe sleep, which literally makes a byte for byte copy of your current RAM state in a file on your hard drive and without using any power. Quite useful, but unfortunately it takes up to 45 seconds to write the file. If you disturb the computer while the file is written, it restarts on resume. To disable safe sleep, terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

To delete the RAM image file, run the following:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

This should solve your problems, it solved mine.

On preview: saw the AAA responses near the end and did not notice RichardP's answer. I'll post this anyways for posterity.
posted by charmston at 8:10 AM on August 5, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh, thanks for asking this. I had the same thing happen to me a couple of times.
posted by sugarfish at 9:05 AM on August 5, 2007

RichardP, Sfving, and charmston have it right on the money -- it's Safe Sleep. No question, and also no question that the implementation is one of the most annoying things about owning a MacBook or MacBook Pro. The worst is that the time the laptop takes to copy the RAM to the disk is proportional to the amount of RAM you have in your laptop, meaning that you're actually penalized for having more memory since this process takes that much longer (the new Santa Rosa-based MBPs with 4Gb of memory take nearly 50 seconds to complete the process!). And you lose that amount of hard disk space, as well.
posted by delfuego at 10:08 AM on August 5, 2007

nthing safe sleep. As seen on Daring Fireball a few days ago.
posted by lodev at 10:55 AM on August 5, 2007

whoops, or you could see Sfvings comment above with the exact same link from 4 hours ago.
posted by lodev at 10:56 AM on August 5, 2007

This could be the solution to what sounds exactly like my problem. I'll give this a shot soon. Thanks, everyone!
posted by jroybal at 11:31 AM on August 5, 2007

Another elegant approach is the "Deep Sleep" widget.
posted by spitbull at 5:44 PM on August 5, 2007