There has been a lot of traffic on troubleshooting forums about the
so-called "sleep of death" wake up from sleep bug that afflicts some
PowerBook users, and perhaps others as well.
The typical symptom is that when you attempt to wake your 'Book from
sleep, you are greeted with a gray screen and obliged to hard restart
or reset the machine in order to get back into the Finder.
I had never experienced this problem until I installed the Mac
OS X 9.2.1 upgrade on my WallStreet
PowerBook last fall, but I found that subsequently about one in
three wake ups would result in the phenomenon 
occurring.
After several days of this, I gave up and went back to running OS 9.1,
which I still had installed on another hard drive partition (I have
four operating systems installed on the WallStreet - the others are OS
9.0 and Yellow Dog Linux 2.2).
The "sleep of death" has never happened on my WallStreet under OS
9.1, or for that matter under OS 8.1, 8.5.1, 8.6, or 9.0. I also
haven't experienced it on my Pismo
PowerBook under any OS version I've used with it - OS 9.1, 9.2.1,
or OS X 10.1.x.
When I downloaded the Mac OS 9.2.2 updater, I was very interested to
see whether the bug had been squashed. Unfortunately, it has not. Just
like in OS 9.2.1, 9.2.2 displays a gray screen about every third wake
up from sleep mode on the WallStreet, although this does not happen on
the Pismo.
When this happens, I can still bring up MacsBug by pressing Command
+ Power Key and then entering the "es" command. This will bring back a
partial view of the Finder screen and allow you to sequentially quit
your open applications, but the Finder does not fully revive. The only
resort is to type "rs" to reboot the Mac (or, if you don't have
MacsBug, Command + Control + Power Key).
This is highly annoying, because otherwise I like OS 9.2. It seems a
bit faster than OS 9.1, and it supports MacSpeech's iListen (which OS
9.1 does not). I switched to OS 9.2.2 when I installed the latest
iListen 1.2, which is my preferred dictation app in the legacy OS.
However, the "sleep of death" thing was just too much of an annoyance
and hassle to tolerate, and after two weeks of frequent forced
restarts, I again reverted to rock-stable and non-buggy OS 9.1.
I've tried trashing the Energy Saver preferences, which some have
suggested might help, but to no avail. Others encountering this problem
might try "downgrading" to OS 9.1 to see if that helps, but your
mileage may vary. Problems like this are just another reason why having
multiple partitions and operating systems on one's hard drive is a good
idea.
I have heard that users are experiencing the sleep of death
phenomenon in OS X as well, although this has not manifested on my
Pismo. Suggested workarounds include:
- Disconnect the Ethernet cable and/or USB cables prior to Sleep
- From Energy Saver Options tab, enable "Wake for network
administrative access."
Since the problem only manifests for me on the WallStreet, I'm
obliged to infer that there is a bug in the OS 9.2 code that is
specific to that machine (and perhaps others, but apparently not the
Pismo).
