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WARNING: Really can be very dangerous!
Authored by: sjonke on Nov 22, '05 07:08:39AM
I think perhaps Apple has good reason to not have this feature enabled on older machines. This morning my Powerbook ended up in a state that was very difficult to recover from. I could not even get into open firmware!

I had been using the Safe Sleep feature set to always Safe Sleep (hibernatemode set to 1) without problems for a couple days. Then I decided to try seeing if Safe Sleep would retain my VPN connection. We use Cisco's VPN client. So I connected to the VPN, then put my PB to sleep. When I then powered it back up it did the usual Safe Sleep progress bar and then I ended up with a lit, but black screen with only the mouse cursor on it. Obviously this is the screen saver lock, except that it never presented a password entry screen and nothing I tried could make it do it. At this point I tried various things including putting it back to "safe sleep" by closing the lid, then re-opening and powering up. Forcing the power off (holding down the power key until it powered off) and rebooting. Of course it then just safe sleep recovered back to the same blank screen! I tried holding down SHIFT while booting. Also I tried disconnecting my external display and then reconnecting. Through some combination of these events, I ended up with only the external display powered - the internal, even with the lid open, would not turn on! I tried to boot into open firmware with command-option-o-f and while it probably worked, I couldn't see anything because the internal screen stayed off!!

The best I could get was the external display powered but with nothing on it and the internal display still off. I guess I could have tried to type into the open-firmware screen blind, but that seemed awfully dangerous. Fortunately I do have a firewire drive with a clone backup. So I tried holding down Option at boot and while this again probably worked, I couldn't see anything because the screen was still off, of course. Fortunately I knew that other hint for booting from an external drive: hold down command-option-shift-delete. That forces your Mac to ignore the internal drive. This worked. Then I was able to go to the terminal and disable the Safe Sleep feature by entering: sudo nvram "use-nframrc?"=false. If you've had it enabled and you decide to disable it, you can save yourself quite a bit of disk space by deleting the safe sleep image that will remain and use up disk space if you don't manually delete it. So after disabling this hint, enter: sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

I wonder if there aren't hardware differences in the new Powerbooks that allow this Safe Sleep feature to work safely that are not in older machines

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