iMac Sleep Disturbances and QEMU (?)

[mkrishnan]

This is a little strange...

I have an iMac G5 / 2.0 / 17". It has been a champion thus far. I have it set to require a password to wake from sleep.

I tried for kicks installing Vista under QEMU. This was probably a stupid idea. The installation was slow and laborious and never really finished. While I wasn't paying attention, the computer shut down the screen, I think while Q had control of the mouse.

I could not get the screen to unblank. I had to force power-down.

Since then, the computer has failed to wake properly the majority of the times... It starts up, but the screen never wakes and I never get to the password window.

Any thoughts?

 

[mad jew]

That sucks buddy. Have you tried resetting the SMU?

 

[mkrishnan]

Thank you, sir!

I will try that. I tried these things:

- Verify disk (okay) and repair permissions (nothing special was wrong)
- Reset PRAM
- Reset other NVRAM

But I didn't know about the SMU as a separate item.

Here is the other strange thing though...it doesn't seem to happen in all cases. When I turn it on and go to the login menu, and click sleep instead of logging someone in, it's okay. And even it seems when I sleep my user without FUS'ing to the login screen, still okay. But if I log in to either the admin account or my normal account and then FUS to the login window and then click sleep, it goes into the zombie state, and nothing except holding the power button down has any benefit.

I just tried the SMU reset...is there any tell-tale that lets you know it worked? It didn't seem to resolve the issue.

Now I'm almost thinking that perhaps somewhere in the QEMU process, some system setting got tweaked? Something that would happen after the system has fully logged in, but not at the initial login window?

This is weird...

 

[mad jew]

Okay, that's tricky. The SMU reset won't give any feedback (from memory) other than maybe a quick whir of the fans, but I could be wrong. As for the original problem, I'm stuck as to where to go next. Obviously check login items but not sure what should come next. I don't use QEMU so I'm pretty useless but I'll have a look around the Apple Discussions page for more. They can be quite helpful (sometimes).

 

[mkrishnan]

Thanks, will do!

I'm almost wondering if perhaps the plist associated with the login window is corrupt. I might try that next. But it's off right now and I'm feeling lazy, so I might do a morning swim and study and then try that later.

 

[mad jew]

I haven't got very far with the Apple site but would be interested to hear how removing com.apple.loginwindow.plist goes. Good luck.

 

[mkrishnan]

*le sigh* It didn't seem to help. Nor did the SMU / PMU / PRAM / etc resets. This is the consistent pattern:

- On boot, before anyone has ever logged in, sleep from the login menu works fine.

- While any user is logged in, sleep works fine, including waking to require a password

- While any user is logged in, if FUS is used to switch to the login window and the computer is put to sleep at the login window, it will not recover from sleep, but will rather seem to wake up internally but not light or revive the screen or respond to input. The only viable option is to force a reset / shutdown. On restart, there is no documentary evidence of a "crash" -- no panic.log entry, no "OS X unexpectedly crashed..." message, etc, etc.

Obviously, this "crash" can be avoided. But it's still frustrating.

 

[mkrishnan]

Just an FYI -- I finally did the latest Security Update (2006-004 I think?) on this iMac and after I did that and rebooted it, the problem seems to be gone, so I think it must've overwritten a problematic system file.

EDIT: I might have spoken too soon. It did not happen the first time I tried sleep from the login window (with users active in the bg), but it did lock up the second time....