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Uncommanded Restarts in Yosemite and El Capitan

iantunnacliffe

iantunnacliffe

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 30, 2015
4
0
Macbook Pro Retina 13 inch Late 2013

My Macbook Pro keeps restarting - or sometimes just trying to restart - when it is sleeping.

Typically I find when I return to my Mac after a gap of several hours that it has either restarted itself and is showing the log-in screen or it is showing a message like "Unable to restart because such and such a thing is active". Usually this is because I have an unsaved file open in a Microsoft Office application.

I don't remember this ever happening before I was running Yosemite. This weekend I upgraded to El Capitan and was interested to see if the problem might go away but it hasn't. Opening up the Mac on Monday morning I was presented with the "Unable to restart......" message.

This doesn't happen every time the Mac sleeps. Maybe two or three times a week.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?
 
Hard to say without further information.

Open Console app and look logs at the time of the restarts, is there anything unusual or otherwise suspicious?
 
Only just saw this reply. Sorry for being dozy. The mysterious restart hasn't happened since Sunday Night/Monday Morning and my console log only seems to go back to Monday afternoon. I'll check it again the next time I get an unwanted restart.
 
The same thread suggests disabling Power Naps in the Energy preferences panel.
 
There is also a suggestion that other external USB devices can cause the problem, so if you have any external USB devices attached, try unplugging them overnight.
 
I don't use an external USB drive with this Mac but I do occasionally leave a printer/scanner plugged in overnight. The restarts haven't recurred since I posted my first question but I'll check the logs and come back if they do.
 
It didn't happen for a few days but then it happened yesterday and again today. Yesterday the restart went through but today it stopped because I had stuff open and unsaved. I have looked at the console but I must admit I am overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in there. I think I can pinpoint the time the crashes happened but what else should I be looking for?
 
this happened to my MBA 2009 once after i updated it to yosemite 10.10.5, but after that. no incident of sudden restart..
 
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