Another fix for a non-sleeping Mac

Feb 13, '03 10:46:51AM

Contributed by: gomezbenz

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.]

Comments (7)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200302130746516