Powerbook 15"- afraid to shut off- this is a good one

[Fisch3Ball]

Howdy guys. You're in for a treat.

So I still have this powerbook under warranty, just ran Disk Utility, repaired permissions, keep it clean etc. I've had some big problems in the last 24 hours.

I was trying to download a work email when the thing froze- touchpad and all- so I did a hard restart, only to get a black screen upon restart and no chime. It wouldn't go gray, show an apple startup or anything. I reset the battery, drained the PMU, zapped the PRAM (I think I did, as there was no chime it's hard to tell). Nothing.

Suddenly, one try, it roars to life- I back a couple things up, then it goes to sleep and doesn't wake up again. Ugh.

Hours later I tried again and long story short is, it's up. I've been backing up like a madman and started doing some web research on what's going on. I'd gladly take it to the Apple Store down the street, but this is definitely a send-away job, not a Procare job, and I've got a ton of work to do.

I've disabled sleep mode and I'm basically waiting for this thing to die again, and I'm pretty worried that if I shut her down, she won't come back on. Does anyone have any idea what's up with this powerbook?

Thanks!

 

[SGilbert]

Have you attempted to startup from your System disk, run Disk Utility to repair disk?

My favorite repair utility is Alsoft's DiskWarrior. Saved by bacon many times!

 

[ElPerroLoco]

I don't know if this will help, but I have been having a similar problem with my g4 (running osx tiger). Sleep mode was coma mode - it would never wake up. It seemed especially if I moved it, it would freeze up - a hard boot would result in a black monitor, though I could head the hd, rom etc working. Other times I would shut it down, then it would not boot - somtimes for weeks at a time. As I had been given the system by a friend, I hadn't put anything more than a few gigs of mp3 files on it, so I wasn't too worried.

Anyway, I posted here a couple of times, and got a couple of ideas. After mixing and matching, I ended up doing this.

1)The next time the system decided arbitrarily to start, I zapped the pram,
2) I reinstalled the os completely wiping out everything else on the hd.
3) Up loaded all the latest updates from mac
4) I went into the power managmeent and set all the sleep commands to never
5) reinstalled my application software

I don't know which, if any, or all of the above made the difference, or even if it has. I only know this:

1) I can put the system to sleep manually and wake it with no problem
2) I can turn the system on and off with no problem

At least for the moment. Please let me know if this helps.

S