Weird wake-from-sleep freeze in Mac OS X (10.2.8)

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
October 15th, 2003 • 5:02 pm

This morning, unfortunately, I experienced a problem in Mac OS X that forced me to use a hard reset on my dual G4.

I went to the computer to wake it from deep sleep, as usually. Both screens lit up as usual, and the fans started whirring, etc. But there was a problem on the main screen. The bottom third of the screen was just a big expense of solid blue. The rest of the screen was displaying the windows and menus etc. as I had left them last night, but the bottom third wouldn’t refresh.

There was a certain amount of hard disk activity for a while, but I was never able to regain control of the interface. There was no mouse pointer on the screen, and the windows and controls were all frozen. After a while, the fans went down to their usual lower levels, and the hard drive activity stopped, but the computer was still frozen.

I suppose I could have waited longer, but it had already been several minutes, and I had little hope. So I ended up doing a hard reset.

Fortunately, this type of thing doesn’t happen too often. But it’s still frustrating when a supposedly rock-solid OS does this. I realize that I have a number of external devices plugged in, and they could be involved in this. But it’s especially frustrating that there is absolutely nothing I can do to try and narrow down the problem. There is no “freeze log” or console log that I could review.

Since the problem is not likely to happen again any time soon, I simply cannot troubleshoot the issue. Yet it might still happen in the future. I guess the perfectionist in me would like to identify the issue and solve it. The pragmatist in me just says, “Get on with your work and forget about it.” These are things that we still have to live with from time to time.


2 Responses to “Weird wake-from-sleep freeze in Mac OS X (10.2.8)”

  1. Philip Waters says:

    I read a similar comment elsewhere “OS X falling asleep on the job” And still don’t know how to fix it.

    Shouldn’t there be a way to tell it NOT to sleep? if i’m running SSH and webservices, each time it goes to sleep, the connection is refused.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Well, you should be able to set it to “never” go to sleep in the Energy Saver control pane. Then you can set the display to go to sleep after a while.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.