For work I use a Mac Book Pro plugged into a second monitor.
Something had gotten messed up when not plugged into my ACD, eventually almost all the time when opening the lid the laptop display would not wake-up. I could hear the finder working/beeping/the hard drive spinning but nothing would get the screen back from black.
This had led to some forced restarts which is never a good thing.
It hadn’t seemed to be happening at work. The clue came when I was at home where I have a DVI to VGA adaptor for sending movies to my TV as a second output.
The screen had gone black again on wake; this time I happened to try plugging in the DVI adaptor to see if there was any video signal and voila; my desktop popped up on my TV. I unplugged the DVI connector and my laptop screen came back on just fine. (seems obvious after the fact)
I searched around and found someone who had seen this, and discovered a potential solution.
“I’ve had this problem too; when I first got my new MacBook Pro it worked fine. Then recently, this problem began to crop up, especially after I had connected an external monitor, put the machine to sleep and restarted — the MacBook Pro screen came up black (sometimes just showing the cursor, sometimes not).
The following seems to have cured the problem for me (at present!). Quit all running applications. Go to /System/Library and find Extensions.mkext. Delete it (password needed). Restart.
I’d like to know if this works for other people.” — http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6854528
I followed through with his recommendation. My mac took a couple extra minutes to boot up the next time; checking the /System/Library/Extensions.mkext file — it was newly created and seemed to be the same size (10.1 meg).
Seems to have solved my problem for now. I’m almost positive this is something that will be addresses in a 10.5.x to come.
24 responses so far ↓
1 Ed Fladung // Mar 18, 2008 at 10:57 am
i’ve been having a similar problem, albeit a little different. when connected to my external monitor (and other assorted hard drives and peripherals) when i put the MBP to sleep, it stays asleep for about 5 minutes and then wakes up. Sometimes it lulls itself to sleep again after a little while, and other times it never goes back to sleep and stays on (all night long). I can’t seem to figure it out.
It also has this weird problem, when I disconnect it from the monitor and peripherals, sometimes it doesn’t know if the monitor is still connected. I open the computer and it goes to sleep. I close it and it wakes up. Eventually after like 3 to 4 min of being closed it resets itself and goes to sleep.
2 Steve // Mar 18, 2008 at 11:06 am
Ed - you might want to check out http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html
Not sure if it will help but it does give you a bit of control over the sleep “type” that your mac will use.
For the second one — Sounds like you might want to try out what I did. I was actually a bit nervous that it would mess things up (deleting a 10 meg system prefs file) but it seems to have worked fine.
3 Abhi // Apr 11, 2008 at 5:51 pm
This problem is getting worse for me day after day. It is now happening almost once every 2 days (sometimes even once a day).
None of the changes suggested so far on the message boards, forums have helped (changing safesleep, reseting SMC, changing lidwake, etc.).
I am running 10.5.2 on Mac Book Pro Intel Core 2 Duo.
Any ideas
4 Steve // Apr 11, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Abhi -
I’ve plateaued about about the same point - it’s about once per day now - especially going back and forth between work (where I plug into a second monitor) and home.
I’m running the same mac as you - still no luck - I can only hope that Apple addresses it with a ” Leopard Graphics Update 1.1″ or something soon.
Let me know I you find out anything and I’ll do the same.
5 Jamie // Apr 13, 2008 at 9:26 am
I am having this problem with a MBP Core 2 Duo, multiple displays.
For me what happens is that one of the displays is black, and the cursor is just some random garbage from memory and the blackness is re-drawn with the desktop image as I move a window around the screen, or drag a selection rectangle.
So far so fine, I can get the display back, and the cursor comes back when an app does the watch, or spinning wheel or death cursor, so that is OK. The REAL PROBLEM, is that something is hogging the CPUU - find and some make command, and whenever I go to drag a window, windowserver maxes out the CPU and causes the dropshadow area of the window to be drawn with random screen parts, and the window moves in a jerky fashion, or sometimes not at all for about 10 seconds… the only solution to this one is to re-boot the mac.
If I let it go on too long, eventually the system locks up completely and I have to force power off, not nice.
It all started off as an annoyance, but the jerky window movements and lockups all started since the last software/firmware update, and I also suspect Office 2008 may be in the mix too, as installing Office seemed to push the problem to new levels.
Anyway, my random associations, but was wondering if anyone else has experienced anything similar.
6 Abhi // Apr 13, 2008 at 1:41 pm
thanks Steve.
Will keep you posted.
How do you determine the version of Leopard Graphics Update?
I see the following:
GraphicsAppSupport:
Version: 1.0
Last Modified: 11/7/07 3:49 PM
Location: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GraphicsAppSupport.framework
Private: Yes
But this was installed on 11/7/07. The problem started happening since about a month back.
7 Steve // Apr 13, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Pretty sure Apple has only released 1 version of that graphics update — 1.0.
8 D. // Apr 14, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I’m having almost exactly the same problem. Extensions.mext deletion solved it the first 2 times but now nothing works. Display doesn’t work under any circumstances, even an external monitor attached, but the system still works.
9 Steve // Apr 14, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Wow — Guess I’m lucky that my display still works — seems there should be more uproar about this crap.
10 Abhi // Apr 14, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Check out the last email
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1337981&tstart=0
that suggests that don’t shutdown the lid with the power plugged in.
Ill try that, ie, take out the power cable everytime before closing the lid.
Let me know if you guys try it as well.
thanks
11 Steve // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Thanks Abhi - I subscribed to that thread.
Also tried a shotgun approach today;
* remove screensaver password
* removed screensaver
* deleted /var/vm/sleepimage
* installed latest firmware
* turned off all energysaver options
Maybe this will help; if it does i’ll slowly try and replicate the issue.
If not — i’ll start testing the power cable suggestion.
cheers
12 Steve // Apr 18, 2008 at 9:24 am
Update:
Something in that last try seems to have worked. I have not seen the issue since I did this !
Crossing my fingers !!!
13 mik // Apr 20, 2008 at 9:14 am
After installing the latest MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update, the problem seems to have disappeared also on my computer.
14 Steve // Apr 20, 2008 at 9:51 am
Great to hear Mik — so far so good for me also.
I”m going to slowly turn back on some of the screen/energy saver options and see what happens.
15 Steve // Apr 22, 2008 at 9:32 am
Updated the post above — let me know if this fixed it for you also.
16 Kristan Kenney // Apr 22, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Hey Steve,
I have a MacBook Pro that originally shipped with Boot ROM version “MBP31.0070.B05″ and the previous firmware update would not install on this computer, however the latest EFI Firmware Update (1.5.1) does install and from my testing (by interrupting the sleep process several times — half closed lid, unplugged USB devices during sleep mode, etc) it would appear that the update has indeed resolved the issue that we were having with wake-from-sleep.
WOOHOO!
17 Steve // Apr 22, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Great to hear !!
I’ve been reading other spots on the net where people are having tons of luck also. It was a pain but at least it’s resolved.
cheers.
18 Tom Ashworth // May 3, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Hey thanks for the note about the fix from Apple - this problem was doing my head in especially when colleagues gave me the well you should have bought a pc routine, thanks very much.
19 Mark // May 6, 2008 at 3:44 am
the second update works! :)
Thanks!
20 Leland // May 17, 2008 at 9:35 pm
The second fix seemed to work for about a week but now I am back to the same problem. All hope is dashed. There has been a lot of talk about this for a long time so I am wondering why Apple has not really been able to solve the problem….
21 links for 2008-05-28 : Trader Eyal // May 28, 2008 at 10:32 am
[...] Mac Book Pro display wake-up issues ? Stevey.com none of this stuff worked for me. (tags: MacBook Pro Display Problem) [...]
22 links for 2008-05-31 « Amy G. Dala // May 31, 2008 at 10:30 am
[...] Mac Book Pro display wake-up issues ? Stevey.com Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)links for 2007-11-20links for 2007-08-06 [...]
23 Tricia // Jun 15, 2008 at 9:30 pm
I have everything upgraded and it is still happening. it’s now even giving me the black screen when i’m NOT moving from the external to regular mode. it’s doing it randomly, all the time. what gives!
24 Steve // Jun 15, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Not sure Tricia; A lot of people have had success with the newest firmware update. Have you tried logging in under a different/new user account to see if it still happens ?
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