What would cause this fatal error - waking from sleep

[jbrown]

Right

1.25ghz Powerbook
768mb ram
Tiger 10.4.3 - fully up to date.
80GB HD - in 2 bootable partitions - OS X 50 ( main ) and OS X 20

I have been suffering from an intermitant problem with waking from sleep mode. This seems ( not 100% sure ) to be linked with putting it to sleep by closing the lid.

At its mildest, it manifests itself by doing this. I have my blank sleep screen and tap a key to be presented with my password box. Type in my pw, and it wakes up. About 5 seconds later the screen goes blank again and I'm back to the beginning. This can happen a few times, then it stays on and all is normal. This happens once in a while.

In a worse case, it will sometimes not show me the password entry box no matter what I do, and I have to force restart it - loosing unsaved data. This happens rarely.

At its WORST ( happened 3 days ago ) - it does as above, but will not reboot fully. Goes through the grey screen, then hangs on the blue screen ( now sometimes its a solid blue screen BEFORE there is the progress bar, and sometimes its a solid blue screen AFTER the progress bar,just before I'd expect the desktop to start loading ). This has only happened twice.

On the last case - after trying a few times, I booted from my second partition. Both volumes mounted fine, and I could see/access all data. I ran Disk Utility - and it reported no problems at all with my misbehaving volume 50. Also did the same from the install disk .

I then ran Disk Warrior - which said that it could not fix my system as it was too damaged!!

So I was forced to re-install my system from scratch - choosing to archive and install - keeping all my settings. This worked fine - and I updated the system again to 10.4.3


Any thoughts as to what would cause this??

Thanks

 

[mad jew]

Since the reinstall, does Disk Utility say your hard disk is fine when you verify it? How about Disk Warrior too?

 

[jMc]

Waking from sleep problems are very often caused by bad RAM. You have two sticks in your machine - I'd suggest taking each out in turn (it'll be fun with only the 256!) and seeing if that fixes your problems.

jx

 

[jbrown]

Thanks guys -

Disk Utility still says all is fine. And Disk Warrior still says there are problems
and it cant repair the disk.

Would this be because it is version 3 thats been around awhile, and it cant deal with Tiger??

Interesting about the ram, but I've had no other ram related problems and IIRC it has passed Techtool 4 ram tests.

 

[mad jew]

Yeah, RAM can go bad though and Tiger updates (especially 10.4.3 FWIW) have been known to bring out a failing stick's bad habits (not letting you wake from sleep). I would recommend running fsck first. Since Disk Warrior's so old, I wouldn't worry too much about what it's finding.

Once fsck has done its thing, then take the RAM out IMO.