This one has everyone in my department stymied. We have a MacBook Air (13inch, 2013) that will shut down if the lid is closed for longer than a few minutes. Problem persists with and without the power adapter. I have, of course, performed all the usual quick fixes of resetting SMC and PRAM. The problem persisted across all users, EXCEPT when I boot into safeboot, the problem goes away.
Running all aspects of AST, from MRI to both the EFI and OS versions of ASD found nothing wrong.
I have also wiped the drive and installed a clean OS from our netboot server. (El Capitan 10.11.5). The problem went away for a while, but then returned a couple days later. Thinking the user may have re-installed some 3rd party glitch, because the netboot install would have wiped it out, I put a blank drive in it (to save their user files), and again installed the netboot image, clean. The problem went away for about half that day, while I shut the lid for varying lengths of time from 5 minutes to 20 minutes, opening the lid to wake it, logging in (as a user would) and then shutting the lid again. Toward the end of the day, it started shutting down again when the lid was closed longer than about 4 minutes. And again, the problem went totally away when I started in safeboot. Left it on, in safeboot, but closed the lid over night. Returned this morning and it woke from sleep normally. Rebooted normally, closed the lid for 5 minutes, and it shut down.
The fact that the symptoms persist across all users, and came back after a new system install would indicate some type of hardware fault such as the sleep switch or possibly the SMC. But why, then, does safeboot alleviate the problem? Usually when an issue goes away with safeboot, it indicates the problem is software related.
Running all aspects of AST, from MRI to both the EFI and OS versions of ASD found nothing wrong.
I have also wiped the drive and installed a clean OS from our netboot server. (El Capitan 10.11.5). The problem went away for a while, but then returned a couple days later. Thinking the user may have re-installed some 3rd party glitch, because the netboot install would have wiped it out, I put a blank drive in it (to save their user files), and again installed the netboot image, clean. The problem went away for about half that day, while I shut the lid for varying lengths of time from 5 minutes to 20 minutes, opening the lid to wake it, logging in (as a user would) and then shutting the lid again. Toward the end of the day, it started shutting down again when the lid was closed longer than about 4 minutes. And again, the problem went totally away when I started in safeboot. Left it on, in safeboot, but closed the lid over night. Returned this morning and it woke from sleep normally. Rebooted normally, closed the lid for 5 minutes, and it shut down.
The fact that the symptoms persist across all users, and came back after a new system install would indicate some type of hardware fault such as the sleep switch or possibly the SMC. But why, then, does safeboot alleviate the problem? Usually when an issue goes away with safeboot, it indicates the problem is software related.