Apple Coma - What to do if your Mac goes to sleep and doesn't wake up

Some of you may have read my guide on dual booting Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Towards the end I mentioned that when my laptop (hp dv5) goes into sleep mode, it fails to wake from sleep or even boot correctly. Here are the steps for waking your computer from this never ending coma.

Step One - Boot the Snow Leopard Install DVD

To do this you are going to need access to the Terminal and the Snow Leopard install DVD is the quickest and easiest way to get there. Insert it into your CD tray and boot into Chameleon.

Once in Chameleon, select it from the list. Wait for it to load, select your language and then go to Utilities/Terminal and type the following:

cd /

cd Volumes/Snow\ Leopard/private/var/vm

sudo rm sleepimage

Type in your password and that nasty sleepimage file should be gone!

Step 2 - Preventative Measures

To help ensure this doesn't happen again, when you next boot Snow Leopard open a terminal window and type the following:

sudo pmset hibernatemode 0

Thats it! Your Snow Leopard partition should be booting once again and hopefully this issue will not crop up again.