Endless Sleep - never returns from sleep

[ZenithApricot]

I'm not sure what to do here. I have done an Archive and Install which didn't work.

Here is waht happens:
when my machine goes to sleep, or just shuts down
the machine doesn't boot or wake up.
If it wakes up there is no cursor - no control with the mouse or the keyboard
If I shut down and then start up, it looks like it can't find the hard drive upon rebooting.

This happens probably 9 out of 10 times - which means that it doesn't always happen.

I don't know what do to. I just switched from a PC laptop where I had strangely similar problems. I'm not running anything special on the machine - mostly address book, mail, ical and ms office.

 

[Murlyn]

If you have reinstalled, it sounds like a hardware problem and if you have similar problems with your PC then you might live in an area that is high in humidity or some other thing that hardware does not work well with.. Take it to an Apple store or call Apple and tell them about it.

 

[Matt]

Are you using a metal table??? This may be magnitised, or do you have any other metal objects near by, anything???

 

[StealthMode]

Your battery dead? I had similar problems...thought I killed my PowerBook and then I pugged it in...it worked fine after that...

 

[witeshark]

One thing you may try is file system check. Restart and hold Apple S for single user terminal and in there type /sbin/fsck -fy until the **** file system **** message stops appearing

 

[hype.it]

Sounds like you have a faulty logic-board, if this is the case no amount of 're-installing' will ever fix that!

If you had your machine for only a few weeks. Return it to an Apple Service Centre or where you brought it from, explain your problem and if it turns out to be hardware related they will either repair or replace the unit. If it's within a few weeks and your unit is completely unscratched, looking like new, they should swap it out without too much hassle.

I discovered that Apple is every good at that!

 

[ZenithApricot]

Problem Solved - bad hard drive

Just to follow up - in case someone runs into the same problem. The solution was to send it back to Apple (via the nice folks at the Apple store in Salem, NH) and have the hard disk replaced.

I have to say that the whole episode of having a laptop for less than two months and have a catastrophic hard drive failure is troublesome but has completely sold me on having a .mac account and Backup.

I was able to move my email box over to the .mac account simply by dragging and dropping the messages in Mail. Burning a backup DVD allowed for immediate use of the new hard drive and all the data came back right away. Very nice.

The other interesting thing I learned as I moved back to a PC for a week without my PowerBook was that switching to use Mozilla's Thunderbird email program. Thunderbird stores in the mbox standard file format. I copied the mail over from the PC to the PowerBook and imported all the messages using the "other" type in Mail - which will bring in mbox format.