2007 Macbook shows black screen and cursor when woken from sleep. What should I do?

Question

When I open the lid from my MacBook, occasionally (not always) it will just show a black screen and a cursor, and the hard drive is spinning, but the log on dialog will never show up. Sometimes it shows up after a minute or two, sometimes it doesn't, so I close the lid - wait five seconds - and try again.

Does this sound like an issue anyone has heard of before?

Answer 1

I've had this happen too. Solutions that occasionally work:

• Close the lid, wait for the 'sleeping' light pulses from the front of the laptop, then reopen and try again.
• Type my password (I have password protected sleep/screensaver) and hit enter blind.
• Wait a few minutes
• Sleep the computer by hitting the power button once (not holding it down), then waking it up.
• Swearing profusely

Solutions that almost always work:

• Force rebooting.

Answer 2

Yeah, I've had this issue very occasionally on my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, I've never found a reliable solution to it. Normally I simply killed the machine and rebooted. I've always suspects it's simply an issue of the hardware/software not syncing up quite right on wake, which is something that can and does frequently happen on all manner of Mac and PC hardware.

Answer 3

This often happened with my 2006 Macbook running OSX 10.4 (Tiger), but then went away entirely once I upgraded OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Answer 4

I have a MacBook with Snow Leopard and sometimes this is happening to me too.
Usually I just close the lid again, wait a minute or such for the light to begin to pulse, open the lid again and then everything works normally.