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Help! PowerBook fails to sleep!

N

Nikhil72

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 21, 2005
1,673
1,565
Hi. I have a 1-year-old 15" PowerBook running Tiger. A few days ago, my computer stopped entering Sleep mode when I closed the lid or hit the button, so after some troubleshooting, I decided to just reinstall Tiger from scratch. I had made a backup of my files onto an external LaCie 250GB hard drive.

I reinstalled Tiger and began reinstalling my software. I plugged the drive in and loaded up my files (music, videos, etc). One by one, everything seemed fine overnight. I installed FrontRow with Enabler (i know, bad!) and things started screwing up again (Sleep issue), so I went ahead and reformatted once again.

I reinstalled things again, leaving out FrontRow completely. I updated to 10.4.6, added several updates from the Software Update menu, etc., and the problem resurfaced once again. Sleep will not function!

I have the following installed:

VLC
iSquint
iTunes 6.0.4
Stuff-It
Delocalizer
iComic
YouControlTunes
Audacity
Quicktime Pro

And that's all I have gotten around to before it came up again. I did plug my external hard drive in and am wondering if there is some driver that is keeping the system awake? I still don't understand why System Keyboard shortcuts fail to work. I cannot even Cmd+Tab to switch windows.

The real kicker is that I'm getting on a plane in 5 hours for another country with my PowerBook. I really hope this is something that can be resolved without reformatting again...I'm not going to be able to do that.

If anyone has any ideas, please post them! I will be sitting at my gate on WiFi, installing necessary software before my departure. Once there, my internet availability is limited, so I'm a tad desperate.

Thanks!

-Nikhil
 
try manually invoking sleep

Try manually adjusting the sleep settings from the terminal. This can be accomplished with the "pmset" command.

See the following: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html


-- Open up the Terminal application (from the Applications/Utilities folder).

-- The following command will set the laptop to sleep when you press the power button (it will ask you for your administrator password):

sudo pmset powerbutton 1
 
Okay, I don't have a lot of expert advice on this, but I will say this:

Continuing to completely reformat your drive and reinstall software hours before leaving the country (and, I'm assuming, the bulk of any support you may have) seems a little over the top. If your system is more or less running okay, and you'll be back home before a significantly long period of time, you may want to consider simply shutting down instead of sleeping for the time being.

Yes, it's a pain. No, it's not a long-term solution. But it should leave you with all the applications you want on your machine, and it seems to be working. Also, since mad jew hasn't jumped in... repair permissions. Run fsck. Delete preferences as necessary.
 
Probably too late, but I would recommend resetting the emw... I mean, the PMU. If you want to delete a preference file, then trash com.apple.PowerManagement.plist although this is completely pointless because a reinstall will have had the same effect and the PMU reset should also revert it back to its original settings. :p
 
So I have limited internet while I'm here. I forgot how slow dial-up is...I swear it was never this slow.

Deleting the Power prefs didn't do it; resetting the PMU also didn't do anything. The fresh reinstall seemed to be the only thing that fixed it. I'm wondering if, when I plugged my external USB 2.0 LaCie hard drive in to copy files onto the PB's hdd, a driver was enabled that is now preventing the laptop from sleeping? I can't think of anything else. I barely have anything installed, let alone anything that could prove to cause "powerbook insomnia."

Any other ideas?
 
Done...let's see if it works. In the meantime, I've noticed that my Spotlight is very erratic...at times, I will type things into the search box and nothing will happen at all...it won't execute anything.

I wonder if Spotlight may be causing a problem by searching or indexing as the sleep funcction is enabled, thereby blocking sleep?
 
Spotlight doesn't normally spend much time (re)indexing your machine so it's unlikely that's the reason your Mac's staying awake, unless there's something wrong with Spotlight. Have Activity Monitor open in the background showing All Processes and tell us if you see anything abnormal at the same time Spotlight stops working. :)
 
hmm, so Spotlight has now ceased completely to work. Upon booting up, the little spinning icon will show for one second when the search commences but nothing happens...subsequently, typing something in the box yields nothing at all. I can't set Privacy folders or anything.

Uninstalling YouControlTunes didn't do anything.

I tried repairing permissions, deleting the Prefs file, resetting power management.
 
Which preference files did you trash? The fact you're having Spotlight and sleep issues is a bit worrying because I'm not sure whether they're related. Is there any other strange stuff happening on your system at the moment? Do you have third party RAM? :)
 
I have 3rd party RAM from Crucial that i installed the day I received my laptop.

I had actually, upon someone's suggestion, removed the entire Preferences folder and then allowed it to rebuild. The folder is still stored in my Documents folder.

Upon some heavier Googling, I found some instructions on troubleshooting Spotlight. Using terminal, I tried: sudo mdutil -E / to remove the index of my Home folder. Upon doing this, terminal stated: "Error, no index found for this volume."

I then tried inducing indexing again in Terminal and it did nothing. In enabling the Activity Monitor, there were no indications of MDS or MDImport running, even when I selected all processes. It seems as though those system files are missing?

Additionally, I tried creating a separate Log-In account and the problem occurs under a fresh account as well, so the problem has to be at the root of the system files.

I find this especially odd given the rather sparse amount of software I have installed. hmm.
 
*bump*. any other ideas? neither spotlight nor find in finder works at all. AND the machine still cannot sleep.
 
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