[WSE]

Any comments on why this happens?

Occassionally both my wife and my 15" Powerbook G4 (1.25 MHz) will not wake up from sleep.

I hold down power button to force a restart, push control command power to force a restart, reset the PMU, nothing helps. On pushing the power button I can hear the hard drive start to come to life, then stop, as if a car engine that turns over a few times then quits.

We repeat the process over and over, and eventually it starts, but I can not associate the solution with any particular event. Last night I plugged in an external monitor and keyboard (USB) and the it started, as if the different configuration somehow woke it up from its coma. Sounds like black magic.

Once I brought in the powerbook to the Genius bar during a coma state and they were equally perplexed. There must be some explanation.

[Polo2883]

This topic is wildly discussed. As far as I know apple is not accepting the fact they have an issue. I just brought mine into the genius bar because apple refused to take the powerbook in for service stating that they cant run the tests that the local stores can. So in it went. The guy at the genius bar didnt like how my hinge assembly was so he wanted to sent it in for repair. Well after that conversation with him he called back 10 min later and said he reproduced the issue and that he thinks its the hinge assembly either being too loose or tight can't remeber. He stated that the backlight is the only thing that is not coming up but the computer is physically on. So he sent it in to apple to have the hinge assembly replaced. I have had this happen to my ibook and now the powerbook so either its a design flaw or a bug in the Mac OS.

[wilsonng]

I had a similar problem. My situation was that there was some kind of sleep sensor - a reed switch - that was broken. I would turn on my PB and it would go back to sleep after 3 seconds. Apparently the reed switch was stuck and it thought I had closed the lid so it would keep going back to sleep.

I had to have that replaced under AppleCare.