Chosen Solution
Running El Capitan where the laptop does not awake from sleep every time. When it doesn’t only a hard shutdown and reboot works. Until now, now I only get black screen with the cursor. Went to single-user mode and removed login plist but to no avail. Boots up to login screen, upon entering my user and password screen remains on faded desktop and eventually chooses to go to black screen with cursor. Leave it on black screen for 10 minutes and it slowly returns to finder screen. Any explanation is appreciated.
Thanks Dan. … after inadvertently allowing the black screen with cursor to remain for 10 minutes or so, the laptop suddenly rebooted on its own and began functioning normally. Guess it was working things out. Boots fine now. On this mid 2009, there is no sleep/awake issue with Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion - only with Mavericks, Yosemite and now El Capitan. Having tried many posted remedies for the sleep issue, I suppose my only alternative is to either use an older OS X or quit allowing for the sleep function altogether.
At this point You need to boot up under a different drive, do you have a bootable external drive? USB or FireWire. If you do try booting up under it and then run Disk Utilities to check your internet drive. It’s possible the drive is failing or it could be too full. Let us know what you discover.
