Intel Mac :: 2009 20" Slow/Unresponsive Hard Drive Access
Mar 11, 2012
I stopped by a friends house to try and help them with an early 2009 20" iMac that started stalling on startup (sometimes before their login screen, and sometimes after). The computer didn't exhibit this behaviour at all, then overnight, it behaved as stated and never once allowed them to get far enough to launch an application or open the Finder.
When I arrived, rebooted and held down Command + Option + P + R, but it had no effect on the problem. I then booted off the original OSX discs and ran Disk Utility. At first it seemed slow to complete, but before long (a few minutes) the Verify Disk finished without any errors. Next, I attempted "Repair Disk Permissions" and noticed that this was taking a very long time, +10 minutes. That said, it did complete without any problems, albiet slowly.
Unfortunately, this did not allow me to login, and I never made it to the login screen. Being a close friend, I offered to take the computer home and try to copy as much data as I could through Target Disk Mode over Firewire.
My first attempt to copy her Home directory got 25% of the way through the roughly 4 GB of data, then stopped. I rebooted and tried again, with even less success than before (I could barely access Folders let alone copy after the reboot). I attempted to recreate the "successful" attempt by unplugging the computer and letting it sit for a few hours. Sure enough, I was able to copy data from the Target Disk Mode mounted drive, but after about 1 GB of copying the access to the hard slowed to a crawl (a few kilobytes per minute) then halted completely.
I've repeated the above process to slowly but surely copy the entire 4 GB of home directory data, and am about to call it quits after salvaging what was important to her.
Question: Is this the sign of a failing hard drive close to the end of its life, or is this something potentially more serious with the logic board? I've only come across a stubborn drive like this with an external drive that was close to failure, and assume this is the case.
What is the easiest way to replace the internal hard drive on a 2009 iMac? I've got 320 gb of space and only a few gb left.I'd like to upgrade to 500 gb or more.I don't want to take the computer apart myself, I don't think.
I have an I-Mac that is from either 2009 or 2010. latly it has been freezing and laging. what hard drive would be good to increase speed and add more space, that is compatible with my model Mac?
My Imac has been running super slow and the hard drive will not stop writing. Current Specs running 10.7.3, 2.8 Ghz Intel i5, 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3. I have had it for less than a year bought refurbed from the online store, I wiped the hard drive once before but it did not help at all, I am currently running parallels but the problem existed before that. I also have an external hard drive but makes no difference in whether it is hooked up or not
So i opened up my mid 2007 iMac and changed the hard drive and cpu, and its all up and running correctly with a clean install of Lion, except that my wifi seems to be slow! It connects to the network and loads webpages slowly, and doing a system update it says it'll take 700hours to download the 1.5gb combined update... I then tilted back the screen and the connection speed improved and i managed to download the update in a couple of hours... so still a poor speed... Im guessing I either left the wifi card poorly connected or got the main and aux antenna cables wrong way round, does anyone know where the white and black cable go? Or which is which? Also, what do these cables connect to (the end not connected to the wifi card)?
I am transferring my iPhoto library to an external hard drive and it is agonizingly slow.
I am attempting to make room on our iMac so am moving our 193 GB iPhoto library to our Seagate 2TB external hard drive. The drive is brand new AND is formated properly as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but the current copy estimate is for it be completed in over 80 hours. I dont beleive the drive is broken as data is continuing to be transferred and not completely hung up.
When I transfer other folders/files the process is much much faster. Problem only seems to be with iPhoto library that I have found.
I'm looking to purchase an external hard drive for my 2009 Macbook os x 10.6.8 (the heavier, white laptop). It looks like most hard drives are compatible for Macbook Pro and newer.
I swapped my hard disk on the above mentioned machine and it won't boot. When I turn the machine on it tells me that there is no bootable disk. I have previously booted from the disk via usb, so i know there is a bootable partition on it. I swapped back the original drive and it boots up fine. Why wont the external drive boot when run internally?
I know I need a Phillips 00 Screwdriver but what screwdriver do I need to remove the hard drive shielding. I googled the topic but I kept getting conflicting information. Some people say I need a Torox T6 screwdriver while others say I need a T8 or does it really matter.
how's the stock drive that comes standard with the laptop? should I even think about spending money upgrading the stock drive to a bigger capacity from the online apple store upon checkout, or should i save it for a third party install?I read somewhere that the WD 500GB scorpio blue 5400rpm beats the Seagate even though the Seagate runs at 7200rpm. True? Any mechanical drive faster than the above two (and I mean one within the reach of the typical consumer, not some new fangled prototype running at 15k rpm)?
I am slowly getting to the limit of my 2tb hard drive and would like to purchase the largest drive possible. It is mainly for my itunes library. So if i can split the library into seperate parts easily i could just buy another 2tb. Would like to hear suggestion about sizes of hard drives compatible with early 2009 mac pro or hints on how to split itunes library into diff parts.
Info: Mac Pro (Early 2009), Mac OS X (10.7.2), its actually OS X 10.7.3
I'm not sure what the culprit is because the night I downloaded the last update of 10.5.8, the circuit for this room also blew. I don't know if it interrupted the download or not, as I wasn't paying attention. However, the next morning I woke up to the gray screen and it never booted. I finally was able to boot it up and the hard drive had a name like kjkldfjkjdkljafkjadkj. I renamed the hard drive and ran disk utilities on it. It needed to be repaired, so I installed the installation CD and used disk utilities from it. It says everything is fine. However, the hard drive now does not show up under Devices when using Finder. Also, everything seems to be a lot more sluggish now.
I'm looking to the size of the Hard disk drive in my 2009 17-inch pro. But can't find if the case will take a 1T HDD or not. As the 1T drive are around 12mm and not 9.5mm of the smaller one right now.
My MacBook pro is running very slow and unresponsive.I have mid 2010 model running on lion. Past few days it looks very unresponsive. Tried to reinstall lion as clean copy. Still no luck.
I have change the hard drive in my macbook aluminium 2009, the new drive is Seagate (Momentus XT ST750LX003) hybrid drive.Each time osx turn off the drive all the applications are killed except osx. I have tested 2 different drives and i have the same problem with both. Seagate do not have anything about this problem.
I even turn off the power saving of the computer and the hard drive... but after an hour of inactivity all the apps are killed ( except osx).
Info: MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3), HDD seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003
I recently picked up a 17" 2009 unibody MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8ghz, 4gb RAM, SuperDrive and a Samsung 1TB hard drive. The system did not come with the original hard drive and I don't have any other hard drives to test and verify that the new larger hard drive is the cause. I have tried a clean install of Snow Leopard, Lion and even Mountain Lion but no matter what my fans always running at max speed (5k+ RPM). I have looked at iStat and the temps of any of the components in the machine never show more than 42*C so the fans should never be running at full blast. Oddly enough smcFanControl shows 0* temp but fan speds for both left and right are always 5.5k+ and very noisy. Using HDD Fan Control I am able to get at least the right fan to run at a controlable speed but its silence is drowned out by the left fan that still runs on full blast. I have already done multiple SMC resets and PRAM resets with no change in the condition. These noisey fans are driving me insane! I have run every available update as well. Is there a chance that the hard drive or something elses temp not being supported or detectable by OSX is causing the fans to default to the fail safe constant high speed?!
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2.8GHz Core2Duo
Background info: A few weeks ago I upgraded from a regular macbook to a brand new macbook pro 2.66 ghz. I replaced the hard drive right away with a 500gb one (had it done by apple). So my machine runs snow leopard now, I used the data transfer mode to basicly copy the data and apps from my old macbook to the new MBP.
The "problem" It all worked fine and smooth until a week ago ...For a week now I have a problem that really concerns me. Whenever I open my laptop from a sleep mode he gets really slow and unresponsive to my commands. Its like its crashing, all I can do to get out of this is a hard reboot.
However .. during a reboot OR a cold bootup the MBP gets stuck in the grey screen with only the apple logo .. after a minute or 3 it will start loading but it will never reach the login screen... The strange thing is that when I do reboot it over and over again .. it eventually will boot normally and when it does the MBP runs fine .. until I turn it off or put it in sleep mode .. then the nightmare will start again.
What I have done
I personally suspects the Hard Drive to be the culprit, I get the feeling that the Hard Drive is having trouble starting up or getting out of sleep mode. I am not sure tough. I have done the following:
- Disc Utility (gives no errors) - Booting up in terminal and run Disc Utility there (repaired a volume issue)
Could this be a leopard issue? I actually can't remember if this issue happened after the last macOS update or not ..I never had a problem with my iBook and Macbook so I have little experience on troubleshooting. So I hope you more technical experienced users can give me some tips on what to do here.
Is anybody else experiencing some horrible performance when running iTunes? I know it's an resource hog, but it's really laggy and unresponsive.. and using more than 100% cpu ....? (I'm running it on a 2009 octo-core MP)
Just checking to see if others have had the same issue with their Super Drive as I have had. In late Dec 2009 I bought a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac which seemed to work great for a few months. Then, every so often, the Super Drive would act up and would not eject a cd/dvd when prompted to do so. At first this really didn't seem to be a major issue, just a minor annoyance to contend with every so often, so I never made a stink about it to Apple. When it did happen, though, I'd eventually have to go through all the usual steps to get the disc media to eject, which sometimes had me turn the computer of then back on again, all the while clicking on my mouse. This really has only happened maybe 10 to 15 times since I've had the computer, which in hindsight seems a lot, but recently, over many attempts to do so, the drive just wouldn't eject a disk. Eventually I got it to to eject, but now it wont except disks, of any kind, at all and it totally unresponsive. Where before it would make a sound as if it was about to mount, it now does absolutely nothing, making no noise and appears completely dead.
So… question: is it dead and if so, is it worth it for me to get it fixed or, maybe, instead buy an external cd/dvd drive that I can just hook up to one of my open USB ports? If so, what might be the best external drive to get?
Here's a fun problem. After installing Sophos anti-virus and starting a (VERY slow) full scan, a day or two later I found my iMac frozen at the screensaver. It was completely unresponsive so I did a hard reboot, at which point it got as far as starting to boot Lion (apple logo on screen, spinning indicator showing) before stalling indefinitely in that state with the indicator spinning.
I restarted and booted from the recovery partition, launched disk utility, and discovered that the SMART status of the drive was "failing". The machine would still boot from the recovery partition and my boot camp partition, but I assumed that the disk failing was why the OSX partition wouldn't boot (the recovery partition worked, as did the windows 7 bootcamp partition). I replaced the factory-installed internal HDD with another of the same make, model, and capacity (Seagate 1TB), and performed a restore from the Time Machine backup on my Drobo.
The result was the same as the original problem - it wouldn't boot, hung with the indicator spinning. Thinking that the Sophos scan was somehow responsible (in-progress when the last TM backup was made) I tried restoring to a backup a few days older, (to the best of my recall from BEFORE I downloaded Sophos) only to have the same result.
Anyone have any ideas? I made a clean install of Lion (using the recovery partition on my old internal HDD, now connected externally via USB) to an external drive while I was waiting for the replacement hard disk to arrive, and it boots fine from that. I haven't tried a clean install to the internal HDD yet, as I'd obviously prefer to recover my installed apps as they were before, that being the point of a Time Machine backup, right?
