Hey Bill, I would first determine if the external hard drive (firewire? usb?) is the root of the problem.
Unmount the drive before putting your laptop to sleep. Observe if it eliminates any/all of the gyrations you're being put through. If it does, unmount the drive before putting your laptop to sleep. OK, so it turns out to be your external hard drive but you prefer not to unmount and disconnect your drive before sleep. The next step is to perform disk repair on the external hard drive. After that, confirm that your drive has the latest firmware update. Does the problem go away? Should you still have problems regardless of whether the drive is attached or not, we pursue a different direction. Let us know. Ward Oldham On Jun 9, 2007, at 11:16 PM, Bill Rising wrote: > Hey folks, > > I've been having a problem for the last two months which appears to > be getting worse: > > Mount an external drive. > Close the lid to put the machine to sleep. > > Case 1: Open the lid almost immediately (as in oops! I forgot) > Problem: the external drives often will not appear. > Usual solution: > Open Disk Utility, see that the disks are there, but their partition > (s) are grayed out. Eject the offending (volumes). Reattach. > Yesterday's problem: > Open Disk Utility. Sits there doing nothing. Spinning Beachball. > Open Terminal. Type cd /Volumes ... Nothing happens, as in command > is never completed. > Try to open another terminal window ... Spinning Beachball > Try to go to the Finder ... Spinning Beachball > > Case 2: Open lid some time later, like the next morning. > Problem: same as above, though I've never gotten the Disk Utility > failing problem. > > Sometimes, the Finder hangs completely, when going through this > circus, and relaunching causes it to semi-quit. The only solution > seems to be to force shut down the computer. > Sometimes the filesystem seems to go blooey, where applications all > stop responding where (I'm guessing now) they cannot find any of > their files. > > I've used Disk Utility from the Install DVD to check the drive, and > it claims all is good. Does anyone have a hint for what I should be > doing to avoid this headache? > > A person on the Apple Discussions suggests wiping the disk clean > and reinstalling. This sounds less than appealing, but I suppose it > could be done if I really had to. > > Bill_______________________________________________ > The next Louisville Computer Society meeting will > be June 26 at MacAuthority, 128 Breckinridge Lane. > Posting address: MacGroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Information: http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
