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Another fix for a non-sleeping Mac System
Because of a rogue third party device driver with no uninstaller, my Mac wouldn't wake properly from sleep. After trying everything else, I finally had to rebuild my Jaguar install from scratch to get it working again. Imagine my frustration when just a week later, I found that my Mac wouldn't go to sleep by itself! Here's what caused the problem, and how I fixed it:

In the System Preferences Energy Saver panel, I had set my Mac sleep time to 30 minutes. I had also set the monitor to shut down in 10 minutes. Finding the default hard drive spindown time too short, I had set the hard drive spindown to 30 minutes using directions from this hint.

For some reason, having both the pmset and sleep times set to 30 minutes made it so my Mac wouldn't sleep. As a matter of fact, it made the monitor come back on and drives spin back up every 30 minutes! Setting the sleep time to 29 minutes solved the problem. I'm thinking that the pmset spindown counted as "user activity" to the Energy Saver software, and so it would keep my Mac up for another half hour, until...

[Editor's note: Very strange, and nice debugging work -- I'm not sure I'll try to replicate this one, but it's one more thing to check if you're Mac is having sleeping problems.]
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Another fix for a non-sleeping Mac | 7 comments | Create New Account
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Not Waking from Sleep
Authored by: gsgm on Feb 13, '03 02:07:25PM

I've had a similar problem that has been bugging mys system as well, however it is that my iMac won't wake from sleep.

I'll see if it is also related to the "timers" that you mentioned.

To discribe the issue, after a period of inactivity, the hard drive will stop and a screen saver starts. (I can wake the computer at this point however, I get asked for the user password twice). If the iMac sits idle longer though, the screen eventually blanks.

Before it completly powers down (throbbing power switch) it is at this point that I cannot wake the computer 90% of the time.

My wife seems to have the most difficulty waking the machine back up. She does use some older OS 9 apps, so it is possible the problem is with that. It is also possible that it is something in her profile (She has a seperate login then I)



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Not Waking from Sleep
Authored by: ykreutzer on Feb 13, '03 04:28:01PM

I am having the exact same problem with my G3 desktop. I have basically a clean install of Jaguar with the 10.2.3 upgrade. Does anyone know of a fix to this problem? The screen just stays black, and I have to hit the power button on the front and restart it. It happens a few times a day.



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Dual G4 sleep problems
Authored by: TTop on Feb 13, '03 02:27:07PM

My Dual G4 867 has been having problems with sleep. If I set the sleep time to an hour, the monitor will sleep, but the hard drive never spins down (like it does if you choose Sleep from the Apple menu). If I set the sleep time to 15-30 minutes, then it successfully sleeps. A little frustrating, I'm guessing that there's probably some sort of running service who's scheduled activity is preventing it from sleeping if I go to the longer time, but I just don't know.



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G4 867 S.P.
Authored by: thatch on Feb 13, '03 04:30:53PM

I have a G4 867 single processor that has difficulty automatically going into deep sleep on its own with OS 10.2.3. I haven't figured out the winning combinations yet and haven't spent a lot of time futzing with testing. But I found that I cannot have the times on the various slider bars the same. They must be different from one another. Even still, the time selected isn't accurate. The Screen Effects panel seems to have a part in it as well. I have also wondered if using anacron has something to do with it since it checks if jobs need to be run every hour just around 15 minutes after the top of the hour.

My current settings are:

Energy Saver

Sleep tab

Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for 15 minutes
Use separate time to put display to sleep at 12 minutes
Put hard disk to sleep when possible

Options tab

none selected at all

Screen Effects

Activation tab

Time until screen effect starts at 7 minutes
Do not ask for password

I know that one time recently when I was distracted away from the computer, it didn't deep sleep with those same settings for about an hour. That after the screen effects start at about 3 minutes and a black screen starts at around 5 minutes.



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Re: Not Waking from Sleep
Authored by: gomezbenz on Feb 13, '03 08:54:41PM

I'm the original poster for this hint. FWIW my original problem was with a USB device. For some reason, as long as the device was plugged into my G4, it would sleep fine and wake up fine. If I unplugged the device, however, my Mac would sleep, but not wake up and I had to push the reset button on my machine.

Since there was no unistaller, I tried to do the uninstall manually. That made it so that my Mac wouldn't wake even if the device was plugged in!

Hope this helps...



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Maybe fixed in Jaguar 10.2.4?
Authored by: jmontes on Feb 13, '03 09:45:28PM

I see that there is a comment in the release notes for Jaguar 10.2.4 that sounds like this sleep problem was fixed. A quote from that release "Addresses an issue in which the computer may not sleep when idle after disconnecting a FireWire or USB device."



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Another fix for a non-sleeping Mac
Authored by: allenhuffman on Feb 17, '03 12:49:40AM

An earlier version of X had a bug where the system would not sleep if File Sharing was on. An update (10.2.1 or so?) fixed this issue, then a computer I had which wouldn't sleep with sharing on would. Great.

But, my laptop, which USED TO SLEEP FINE <grin>, no longer sleeps ever. As me. If I log out and let it sit at the login screen, or as Guest, it will sleep, but not as me.

Odd, that.

---
-- OS-9 Al



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