Freeze, no wake from sleep, and one beep repeats on restart -- intermittent

Question

My 4 week-old macbook pro 5,3 (2.8GHz, 4GB) started having trouble waking from sleep this week. At first, a hard reboot solved the problem. Yesterday, it would not wake from sleep and the sleep light would blink twice then repeat. Upon hard reboot, this time it emitted a loud beep repeatedly (one single beep, then silence) and could not boot the OS.
I called Apple and tried all the various reboot key combinations and also inserted the OSX CD and tried to boot from CD. None of this worked, just got the beep beep beep.. They eventually said this indicated a bad logic board and scheduled an appointment at the Genius bar.
The strange thing is, I was trying to eject the OSX install CD and mistakenly thought that holding down E during reboot would do this (maybe this was some trick from old macs, can't remember..) and it booted up just fine! It worked overnight, then froze again the next day. After hard reboot, it was back to the beeps again. This time, I immediately tried holding down E again and it worked again!
Obviously I have a major hardware problem, but this at least allowed me to do a time machine backup before taking the computer in for service. It may be a coincidence, but twice in a row certainly is strange. Has anyone had anything like this happen to them? Thanks!
John
Message was edited by: jef76

Answer 1

Hello.
I've had this issue too. I've found that I can reproduce this issue by putting the computer to sleep when there is major hard drive activity.
First, reset the PMU. That didn't work for me, but it might for you.
If that doesn't work, reset the PRAM. That didn't work for me either, but it might for you.
If neither of those work, here's how I was able to solve the problem:
1: Open System Preferences and go to Energy Saver.
2: Find how many minutes it is before the computer goes to sleep. Remember this number; you'll need it later.
3: Open Terminal.
4: Type "sudo pmset -a disksleep n" where n is a number greater than zero but less than the number from step 2.
5: Enter an administrator password at the "Password:" prompt.
6: Remember in the future not to put the computer to sleep when the hard drive is busy.
Good luck!