MacBook won't sleep--is Parallels responsible?

[chabig]

This is so far unconfirmed, but it seems like after running Parallels I can't get my MacBook to go to sleep, either by closing the lid or by selecting it from the menu. Has anyone else seen this?

Chris

[Al_Q]

This is so far unconfirmed, but it seems like after running Parallels I can't get my MacBook to go to sleep, either by closing the lid or by selecting it from the menu. Has anyone else seen this?

Chris

Yes. Several times on my macbook (original 2 GHz). 10.4.9 and 3188. But sometimes I can run parallels, shut down cleanly, and the Mac will still go to sleep normally.

When it gets in in its sleepless state, the Mac may also refuse to shut down. It gets to the stage of having a dark grey screen with the usual startup/shutdown rotating wheel of straight lines (not the coloured beachball), and stays in that state until I press and hold the power button to force shutdown. It must be very nearly fully shut down, because there is no message about improper shutdown when I restart.

I am beginning to suspect some kind of interaction between Parallels and Microsoft Office, especially Entourage email. After I've had both of them running at the same time, the chance of problems seems much higher.

[chabig]

You've described my situation exactly. I forgot to mention that when it's in that state it also won't shut down. It just spins the progress wheel as you said until I press and hold the power button.

I do run Office. But I don't use Entourage at all. So perhaps we can eliminate that as a possible cause.

I wonder if it indicates something wrong with one of the Parallels' kernel extensions.

Chris

[Eru Ithildur]

We had this issue from time to time on an Attorney's laptop when we used the Betas because of a required feature-set. 'Coincidentally enough' he was the only one who had the issue and the only heavy user of M$ Office 2004. I just attributed it to the Betas, but we shall see now that I have put him on a stable version after a complete Parallels wipe... No crashes, four days running!

[chabig]

Interesting. I first got Parallels at 3170, which was beta right? Then I upgraded to 3186 and 3188. I'll remove Parallels and try a fresh install of 3188. And I do use Word and Excel quite heavily.

[Eru Ithildur]

Here un-install and re-install this way, it ensures things are removed and fresh, it is section D. http://forum.parallels.com/thread10384.html

[Archy]

Hello everybody,
We have reproduced this situation on one of our MacBooks. It seems to be a problem with memory. I've checked it and found many errors.
So, I must suggest you to check your MacBooks with Memtest.
Please download memory test program for Mac from http://matt.ucc.asn.au/memtest/ , record this *.iso image to CD and boot from it to check performance of your memory.

[simplicity]

From the MemTest page:

On my MacBook 1st gen 1.83ghz, I get some errors at various locations around or below 1MB. Someone else with a MacBook Pro got the same thing, so I guess the BIOS (emulation) isn't giving a correct memory map

With that there, can we really rely on this tool to accurately discover memory errors? I'd doubt the folks at Apple would take a return for repair based on a tool that admits to false error reports. Can someone suggest a better memory check tool?

If there were errors in the memory, I'd guess we'd be seeing more kernel panics and not soo much sleepless macs.

[Eru Ithildur]

Hello everybody,
We have reproduced this situation on one of our MacBooks. It seems to be a problem with memory. I've checked it and found many errors.
So, I must suggest you to check your MacBooks with Memtest.
Please download memory test program for Mac from http://matt.ucc.asn.au/memtest/ , record this *.iso image to CD and boot from it to check performance of your memory.
I wouldn't say that is necesarily the issue... I have not had a single crash on the ATTY's laptop in OVER two weeks since I re-installed things and upgraded to the latest build. I don't have the old logs, but it seems to have been healed with 3188. At least my issue of Kernel Panics.

[valkraider]

I have been having this problem as well, and I was directed to this discussion. It is the first time that I have heard of Parallels possibly being involved.

But My MBP won't sleep about 1 out of three times.

This only started with upgrading OSX to 10.4.9 - before that I never had a single problem.

Anyway, I will be following the Parallels angle too...

[Pharrett]

Same thing here occasionally. Once in a rare wild, it seems like it has shut down, but when I close the lid, the light on the latch comes on and I can not restart the machine. If I put my ear to the the system (MBP) I can hear the drive still spinning. i have to hold the power button to turn it totally off. Anyone else have that experience?

[chabig]

Interesting news...following Archy's advice, I downloaded and ran memtest. There were lots of errors reported. Now, I have two 1GB third-party DIMMs installed. So I tried to isolate them by testing them one at a time.

1. DIMM A tested perfect in my left slot.
2. DIMM B generated errors in that same slot
3. DIMM B generated errors in the right slot, which led me to suspect DIMM B, but then...
4. DIMM A generated errors in the right slot.

So at this point, I was unsure of my logic board and the DIMMs.

I put one my original Apple DIMMs in each slot and it tested fine in both. So I put the third-party DIMMs back in and they both tested good.

Conclusion: The only conclusion I could make was that my memory was OK and the act of reseating the chips several times exercised the contacts to the point that they made a good connection.

Recommendation: Try reseating your DIMMs, repeatedly if necessary. I'll be on the lookout for more sleep problems. Hopefully, there won't be any.

Chris

[Eru Ithildur]

Same thing here occasionally. Once in a rare wild, it seems like it has shut down, but when I close the lid, the light on the latch comes on and I can not restart the machine. If I put my ear to the the system (MBP) I can hear the drive still spinning. i have to hold the power button to turn it totally off. Anyone else have that experience?
I actually get that at times with my PB G4 17", I find that if I hit buttons, wait a few seconds shut the lid, wait a few seconds, open the lid, hit buttons again, it will snap out of that.

Chris,
The order also seems to throw it at times, don't ask me why, but it was on my XServe.

[chabig]

More interesting memory trivia:

I discovered when I was testing each DIMM individually that one DIMM always showed up as DDR398 with a front side bus speed of 199MHz. The other DIMM showed up as DDR664 with a front side bus speed of 332MHz.

Also oddly, one logic board slot always reported the memory as DDR-I and the other one always reported DDR-II.

When I put both DIMMs back in, memtest said that all of my memory was DDR398 with a bus speed of 199 MHz. So I swapped the two DIMMs and now memtest reports DDR664 with a 332MHz bus speed.

Furthermore, my machine seems faster than before...either memtest is weird or swapping the DIMMs made a difference.

Chris

[valkraider]

I have run Memtest several times with no reported errors.

I don't think this can be a memory issue as I never had a single problem in the year that I have had this MBP, until I updated to 10.4.9.

[Eru Ithildur]

I have run Memtest several times with no reported errors.

I don't think this can be a memory issue as I never had a single problem in the year that I have had this MBP, until I updated to 10.4.9.
Have you tried doing a fresh install of Parallels?

[chabig]

OK. Today I just had the problem again. So I'm leaning away from a memory problem. I've also done a (very) fresh install of Parallels 3188.

[clarkn]

I have this problem (won't sleep and won't shutdown properly) frequently and my memtests run successfully. I've also noted that I have a problem printing to a network printer when it won't sleep, but this might be unrelated.

I'm not sure whether it is Parallels or not, but I'm running 3188. I'm running 10.4.9 and don't recall having the problem with 10.4.8.

[chabig]

When it happened to me today, I found this in my System Log:

Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: sleep
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: IOUSBWorkLoop::closeGate - interrupt Thread being held offEnabling XMM register save/restore and SSE/SSE2 opcodes
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: Started CPU 01
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: IOBluetoothHCIController::restartShutdownWL this is a wake from sleep
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: System Wake

In my lay opinion, it looks like the computer went to sleep and immediately woke up. But what would cause that?

Chris

[dkp]

When it happened to me today, I found this in my System Log:

Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: sleep
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: IOUSBWorkLoop::closeGate - interrupt Thread being held offEnabling XMM register save/restore and SSE/SSE2 opcodes
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: Started CPU 01
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: IOBluetoothHCIController::restartShutdownWL this is a wake from sleep
Apr 12 11:56:53 big-kahunas-computer kernel[0]: System Wake

In my lay opinion, it looks like the computer went to sleep and immediately woke up. But what would cause that?

Chris

I don't know what wakes OS X from sleep - perhaps network service requests such as DHCP or DNS? If so then any VM activity that generates net traffic that OS X handles could shake it awake.

[clarkn]

I have this happen when all applications are closed, no VMs are running.

[cathyf]

I have had a similar problem, but with waking from sleep. It goes to sleep and won't wake up without powering down. Sometimes I could get it to wake up with 5-10 minutes of "messing around" -- hitting keys, ejecting and mounting a CD, fondling the trackpad -- so maybe it is a not-being-patient-enough problem. I have noticed the association with Office 2004 apps and parallels running together. But mostly what I have seen is that since I put an second 1GB in the 2nd slot (not disturbing the original apple 1GB of memory) the problem has almost entirely disappeared.

I tend to run a ridiculous amount of stuff all at the same time -- I really USE my computers, and my history is with vms and unix where virtual memory works correctly so I tend to expect that if I use more memory than I physically have that it should just work (if more slowly). (I was a VMS system manager long ago, and so have passed the exam on Anatomy of a Page Fault...)

[clarkn]

cathyf, I think that is a very different problem. I've had problems waking from sleep occassionally, usually I can get past it by opening the lid, hitting the power button, then hitting 's' on the keyboard, then closing the lid, waiting for it to go to sleep, and opening it again. It's a bit annoying but not as bad as the machine not going to sleep at all.

[chabig]

This happened again to me today. My MacBook wouldn't sleep, shutdown, or restart. But I got a message that it couldn't shut down because Mirror Agent was still running.

[Archy]

Hello again.

Please look at this thread:
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=3040&highlight=mac+sleeps

Also please do the following:

When in Windows right click Desktop and select Properties, go to Screen Saver tab, click the Power button, and in Power schemes set Portable /Laptop and adjust the parameters below to be less then in your MacOSX settings, and check that none of them is set to "Never".

[chabig]

Hi Archy, thanks for weighing in on this. It's frustrating. I have set my XP power management settings to be less than my Mac settings and will let you know what happens. It seems worthwhile to note that I have this problem even when Parallels is not running, so I'm not quite sure how the Windows settings could be a factor.

[a_w]

Indeed, uninstalling Parallels fixed the sleep problem for me.

I was suffering from the problem since upgrading from the Core Duo to the Core 2 MacBook Pro last December. Normally I'm using the MBP with two 23" Cinema Displays, one at home, one in the lab, so I do not open the MBP normally. In this mode I could always go to sleep without problems. However, for meetings I had to use the MBP without attached display. At the end of the meeting I was never able to put the MBP to sleep (or to shut it down or restart it). I could only do a forced shutdown. Please note: Parallels was never active when this happened.

I tried everything to isolate the problem (including 2 fresh installs of Mac OS X), but I never waited long enough before reinstalling Parallels.

After finding this thread two days ago, I immediately uninstalled Parallels (with its uninstaller), and since then the problem is gone for me.

So now I'll always have to remember to uninstall Parallels when going to a meeting :-)
(No, I've switched to VMWare which does not have the sleep problem).

[Horizontal]

Sounds as though there's a problem with Parallels? I might hold off installing it until this issue is addressed.

[chabig]

After trying everything else I could think of, I did an archive and install today. I don't need Parallels much, so I didn't reinstall it. If my machine can go for a few weeks without any problems, I'll reinstall Parallels. If the problem returns, I'll know if Parallels is responsible.

Look for a report in a few weeks.

Chris

[chabig]

One week without Parallels...no sleep/wake problems so far.

[chabig]

It's now been two weeks without any problems. I'm going to reinstall Parallels and see what happens...

[chabig]

Update: I reinstalled Parallels yesterday, and today I had the no sleep problem again. I think I can say with certainty that it's definitely Parallels.

Furthermore, I ran "sudo /Library/StartupItems/Parallels/Parallels stop" so the only kext I had loaded at the time was "/Library/StartupItems/Parallels/Pvsvnic.kext". Perhaps this particular kext is the culprit.

I have unloaded it as well, and now I'll see if the problem appears again.

Chris

[chabig]

Another update. I've been running with the kexts unloaded now for 3 days and haven't had any problems. I'm convinced this is a Parallels kext problem.

[elf]

I have had an entirely different sleep issue for a few months now, and Apple support now wants me to try running without Parallels installed to see if this is a similar issue -

On my MacBook Pro, I usually put the machine to sleep several times a day by simply closing the lid. Every few days it seems, I will close the lid and instead of going to sleep, the machine performs a reboot. There is nothing in the system logs that suggest what went wrong, we go straight to a reboot as if the machine were just suddenly turned on. I found this thread while searching for similar issues to mine and discovered this thread. I'm guessing I should start by unloading the kexts as you mentioned, or perhaps a complete uninstall?

I'll be watching this thread now for updates, and post my own results on this.

[elf]

After unloading the Parallels startup items, I did not notice any more reboots on sleep.
Shortly after, Parallels 3 was released and I decided to give it a try. Now instead of rebooting on sleep, the MacBook Pro consistantly has trouble waking up when I open the lid. It seems to try to start up, but I never get anything but a black screen. After a minute or so, it goes back to sleep mode while the screen is still open, and then I can press the power button to wake it. All this from only the startup items, I dont even have to actually run Parallels to get this behavior.

how very frustrating!!

[clarkn]

chabig: thanks for your reports - please post back if you think "/Library/StartupItems/Parallels/Pvsvnic.kext" is the problem. Maybe Parallels will pay attention to this and respond with a fix. It is a very frustrating problem.

[clarkn]

This happened three times last week and I can't take it anymore. Its not just that I can't sleep the machine but I can't print to any network printers through the Mac side either when it gets in this state. (I haven't tried through a local printer)

I uninstalled Parallels and am trying out VMWare Fusion. You can only take a single snapshot in Fusion - I hope they change this in the final release. I like the new snapshot manager in Parallels 3.0 better but oh well. If I don't have any stability issues with VMWare Fusion, I'm going to switch permanently.

[clarkn]

So I officially apologize to Parallels. I've had this issue recurr a couple times since I removed Parallels and have been running VMWare Fustion. I'm inclined to believe that it is not related directly to Parallels or VMWare Fusion...

I can fix the printing issue by restarting the CUPS daemon, but I still can't sleep (or shutdown) the machine. I have taken this to Apple forums to seek advice or to find others with similar problems.

[w7ox]

Hello everybody,
We have reproduced this situation on one of our MacBooks. It seems to be a problem with memory. I've checked it and found many errors.
So, I must suggest you to check your MacBooks with Memtest.
Please download memory test program for Mac from http://matt.ucc.asn.au/memtest/ , record this *.iso image to CD and boot from it to check performance of your memory.

A really dumb question (I hope) but after booting from the ISO CD, how do I get back to OS X? I now have the CD in the drive and no way to remove it .. and reboot is from the CD.

Phil

[clarkn]

A really dumb question (I hope) but after booting from the ISO CD, how do I get back to OS X? I now have the CD in the drive and no way to remove it .. and reboot is from the CD.

Phil

Hold the option key during boot and select the volume.

I guess I should have added that my problem is not bad memory. My memtest runs successfully, no errors.

[nitschi]

I'm experiencing the exact same problems with Parallels and OS X.

After installing Parallels Desktop last week (most actual build) my MacBook simply "refused" to shut down or reboot. Even after some "hard" shutdowns (holding down the power button) and reboots I couldn't get rid of the problem. Whether or not Parallels or any VM was running.

After I did some research via Google I removed the Parallels folders from Library/StartupItems and turned the MacBook off (by holding down the power button again). I restarted and without the Parallels-StartupItems my MacBook shuts down and restarts like a charm.

Downside: Parallels stopped working without those StartupItems. Now I can decide wether

a) to have working MacBook which can shut down, reboot and wake up from sleep mode
or
b) to have a working Parallels

Great.... :( Maybe the developers can take a look into this, it definitely has something to do with those StartupItems.... at least on my MacBook (OS X 10.5.1 and 10.5.2 show the same behaviour).

[nitschi]

Sorry for "pushing" this thread, but did anyone ever came to any solution??

[Xenos]

Hello Nitschi,

The issue might happen not only with Parallels but with different Mac applications as well. When you encounter the problem, please perform a "hard" shutdown, then repair disk permissions on Mac and reinstall Parallels.

Best regards,
Xenos

[nitschi]

Hi Xenos,

thanks for your reply and the suggestion. I will try it a bit later and post the results here! :)