Why won't my MBP wake up?

July 23, 2008 12:39 PM

Whenever my Macbook Pro goes to sleep, it won't wake up.

Here are the relevant details:

-Whether it goes to sleep by being closed, or by being idle too long, the result is the same: black screen, hard boot being the only recourse.
-Runing OS X 10.4.11.
-I've verified the disk, and it is fine.
-I've verified the disk permissions, and they are fine.
-I've wiped the PRAM (by holding command-option-p-r on reboot) and the problem persists.
-The battery appears to be charging and draining at the same rates as always.
-I've recently installed: demo version of ableton 6, protools 7.1.1 (upgrade from website), the latest Software Update recommendations.

Any other suggestions? Thanks.

posted by jon_kill to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Have you tried resetting the SMC? Another possible cause could be if Safe Sleep is enabled, and you move the laptop while it is writing RAM to disk, just enough to trip the sudden motion sensor and park the disk heads.
posted by mkb at 12:47 PM on July 23, 2008

A couple of things I would check if this happened to me:

Does it happen in a fresh user account?

Are you using hardware suspend or software suspend (the Safe Sleep "hibernation" mode)--perhaps accidentally by testing out a widget like Deep Sleep?

Have you done any RAM tests?
posted by bcwinters at 12:47 PM on July 23, 2008

This is a known problem with many MBPs -- if you take it to the Genius Bar, tell them all the troubleshooting steps you've already taken, they will send it back to the North Pole to get the motherboard replaced.
posted by spilon at 2:32 PM on July 23, 2008

My wife's Macbook occasionally did this. I followed this hint, and it seemed to do the trick.

Also, make sure you have the latest firmware updates, if there are any.
posted by O9scar at 3:40 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite]

I have 10.5.4 and whatever this issue is, it's still not fixed. So upgrading to Leopard won't help (just as a troubleshooting dead end for you). Perhaps Snow Leopard will fix it?
posted by zpousman at 3:45 PM on July 23, 2008

So just to be clear, we're talking about the problem where it looks like it wakes up but the screen stays dark? Lots of details about it here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=441089


I had it to until the EFI update (which was pushed down in Software Update) cured it for me. Seems to be a video driver / firmware issue. The main display just gets "stuck" in the wrong mode. In fact, if you plug an external monitor in, you can see that it woke up fine.

Anyway, if you can' find a real fix (assume you've applied all pending updates?), I rigged together a workaround to the problem with bubblegum and bailing wire. Feel free to give it a shot if all else fails: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=464849
posted by meta_eli at 4:08 PM on July 23, 2008

Are you connecting to any external networked services? I had an ldap problem that was resolved by disconnecting from an ldap server. My machine would wake up, try to connect (but still show a blank screen) and then go back to sleep before the connection timed out .
posted by captaincrouton at 9:15 PM on July 23, 2008

Have you tried dumping your sleepimage file? This is the file that the contents of your computer's memory gets written to when you put it to sleep. It can sometimes go wonky and deleting it is completely safe.

Open /Applications/Utilities and run Terminal. Type the following exactly as written -- better yet, copy and paste it -- and supply your password when prompted:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage
posted by pmbuko at 10:29 PM on July 23, 2008

YEA!!! Wow, I've been having this problem for ages..don't know why I hadnt googled to see if it was global issue...O9scar's link upthread seems to have solved the issue for me (so far). Thanks all!
posted by tingting at 6:54 AM on July 24, 2008