MacBook Pro sleep mode issue

The hard drive is showing it has had too many "Hardware ECC Recovered Errors". This means the drive may no longer be able to protect the data from corruption if more errors are encountered. It is certainly possible this is contributing to the wake from sleep issues.

Make sure to have a good backup while you can still access the data and before the data possibly becomes corrupted. Installing an SSD will definitely improve performance of this laptop. The Crucial MX500 SSD would be a good option, but avoid the Crucial BX500 series at all cost. Another option would be the OWC Mercury Electra 6G or OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G.

Usually if a failure also occurs when booting from a known good boot drive, then usually it indicates a hardware issue of some sort. Unfortunately the internal hard drive failure can sometimes interfere so I personally like to disconnect the internal drive just to be safe. A sleep issue like you are reporting is hard to narrow down since sleeping & waking while booted to an external drive can sometimes have issues as well even on a perfectly working system.

You can try unchecking "Put hard drive to sleep when possible" in the Battery System Preferences to see if that makes any difference. If this works, then most likely the internal drive is the problem.

Like I said before the internal drive could be causing the wake from sleep issue, or it could be an issue with the sleep sensor, or it could certainly be an issue with the Logic Board. It takes a bit of work to eliminate various items to nearly confirm the issue is the Logic Board itself (there are no guarantees). Having an external boot drive to test is useful so you can compare how the system is working when the internal drive is connected and if it makes any difference when disconnected. You can sometimes test the sleep sensor by holding a magnet over the sensor which I believe is located along the left edge of the palmrest usually around the front row of the keyboard. If the magnet causes the Mac to sleep & removing the magnet wakes the laptop, then most likely the sensor is working. That leaves the hard drive or the Logic Board. It is also possible to disconnect the sleep sensor from the Logic Board to eliminate the sensor entirely, but the connector is very fragile and easily damaged (the locking lever tends to pop off when closing (locking) the connector.

Please run the third party app EtreCheck and post the report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. This report will help us understand your system so we don't have to play 20 questions, and it may provide some clues to the problem.

Also, to check the health of the internal drive, run DriveDx and post the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

When you attempted to reinstall macOS, did you perform a clean install by first erasing the whole physical drive, or did you just reinstall macOS over top of itself?

I know you mentioned running the "startup diagnostics", do you mean the Apple Diagnostics?

macOS has a built-in battery condition status which is fairly good at providing the battery status at least for older versions of macOS 10.14 and earlier. Keep in mind that sometimes the condition can fluctuate between two states such as when the capacity is at the borderline value for the other condition, or if the battery hardware failure is intermittent.

Possible battery conditions for macOS 10.14 and earlier:

• Normal -- should be Ok
• Replace Soon -- battery Full Charge Capacity (FCC) has dropped below 80% of original Design Capacity
• Replace Now -- battery FCC has dropped significantly below Design Capacity...unknown % when this is triggered, but most users will probably not be happy with laptop when using the battery.
• Service Battery -- macOS has detected a hardware issue with the battery...battery should be replaced.

There is a third party app Coconut Battery which can easily show the current FCC as related to Design Capacity and may have its own health gauge/status (not sure how good the gauge/status is).

Usually when the battery does not perform to your expectations (varies for each person in how they use the laptop), then the battery should be replaced. Some battery failures will not be shown in the status or even diagnostics, although I have developed a method of detecting some more subtle clues from the battery itself...more so to confirm the source of the problem, but most users don't need this as they know how their battery normally behaves.

You can try running the Apple Diagnostics, but it is unlikely to reveal anything unless it detects a power or SMC issue which could affect waking the laptop.

You can try installing macOS to an external USB drive and see how the laptop works from the external drive....it will be slower due to the USB2 ports being very slow compared to the internal drive, but it should be able to verify the laptop is otherwise working. This is the best option along with the diagnostic, but some external drives don't always behave as expected when waking the laptop from sleep, but if it works fine, then that is a successful test.

Another option is to try creating & using a bootable Knoppix Linux USB stick, but I don't recall how it handles sleep on the Macs especially since I have not really used either the v8.6.1 or v9.x versions that way on the Macs.

While I believe the hard drive is most likely the issue, the other thing that can prevent the laptop from waking properly is having something magnetic near the sides of the laptop which would trigger the laptop's sleep sensor to keep the laptop asleep, or a battery or power issue.

igor-dB wrote:

I believe I will try a change of the hard disk with an SSD, if price is reasonable. It is a bit silly to throw away the whole computer just because sleep mode does not work.

At least if the drive is not the issue, then you can still re-use the SSD in another older computer or as an external drive for any computer by connecting the SSD with a USB to SATA Adapter, drive dock, or enclosure.