OS X :: Frequent Lockups - Is My Hard Drive Dying
Feb 3, 2010
I have a Macbook Pro that's about two years and 4 months old, running the latest version of Leopard. I was problem free for about two years until last October when my MBP suddenly wouldn't boot up (hung at the grey apple screen). I took it to my University's computer repair center, and they said either there was a corrupt OS file, or my HDD was going bad. I went home and booted from my OSX disc and did a full erase and install. My computer worked fine for a few months following the erase and install
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Sep 9, 2009
I'm pretty sure the problems we're having with a white MacBook are due to hard drive problems, but I thought I'd get a second opinion:
- Computer was dropped on a hard floor
- Started making whirring noises and would occasionally lock up or suffer long periods of the spinning wheel
- Disk Utility check, after booting up from the CD, cam back with no errors
- Decided to wipe it and reinstall anyway
- Snow Leopard got stuck halfway through installing, so rebooted. Installation then carried on no problems.
- Still suffering periods of the spinning wheel - it 'shudders' sometimes, rather than spinning smoothly. There have also been a couple of lockups.
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Jun 9, 2009
I'm on an iBook G4 running OS X 10.4.11. It comes with about 50GB of hard drive space and 512MB of RAM. I bought it around 2006 or so. Also, I have no idea what the heck I'm talking about, so I hope you'll be patient with me.
1) It's been running extremely slowly, especially when Firefox is running. Rainbow pinwheels when switching between programs, when switching between tabs in Firefox, when opening new windows in Firefox or typing search terms into Google, etc. It runs faster immediately after I restart, but then will slow down after a few days of running the machine. (It also runs a little faster when my external drive (which holds my 19GB iTunes library) is disconnected.)..................
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Sep 6, 2009
So basically, my hard drive is dying (clicking/chirping noises, random freezes), but for now it seems to keep working and until it finally breaks, I want to put as little load on it as possible and was wondering whether its better to put the machine to sleep at night or turn it off completely? I realise it's fairly minor by itself, so in addition I'm trying to stream as much video as possible instead of downloading, I've got it constantly hooked up to an external making hourly TM backups, also got a carbon copy bootable clone made.
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Feb 20, 2008
I've just installed 10.5 and the .2 update in the past couple of days. Everything was working okay and then it appeared that Spotlight started to hang on something. Once it started hanging, weird things started to happen with my drives. As a professional photographer, my drives are my life and when weird things start to happen, I get a little freaked out.Yesterday, a message popped up saying something like the volume was corrupt and I should backup and reformat. Last night, everything pretty much stopped working. Any access to that volume caused the machine to completely lock up. Spotlight was saying, and still is, that there are a little over 2 million hours left to index.
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Jun 23, 2014
Ive been getting this issue on my macbook quite frequently now; dont think its hardware related and occurs randomly at any time up to 3 times a day where the computer will slowly begin to freeze.Â
It (usually) begins by my browser not being able to access a website (just a white screen in browser section), at this point im able to alt tab between apps for some time but eventually everything will hard freeze, same with the cursor which will turn into a rainbow wheel and also eventually freeze. Â
Can only resolve this by power button for 6 secs (good thing it starts up in 5 seconds)Â
MacBook Pro
Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013
Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Software OS X 10.9.3 (13D65)
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May 21, 2012
There appears to be a rather serious (IMHO) design oversight in OS X's file system routines, as concerns the handling of external drives with power-save features. I've never bothered mentioning this online before, as I've always expected it to be resolved, "in the next update". But I've been waiting now since 10.4 Tiger and nothing yet. So I figured I'd raise the issue in here, at least to see what others might have to say about it.Â
I keep an external (Seagate) USB drive connected to my personal iMac, for use mostly by Time Machine. I'm sure I'm by no means alone in this practice. :-D The drive is, of course, modern and nice enough to power down when not in use (well, "spin down" at least.)Â The trouble is, even though OS X's disk caching system really ought to know (IMHO) that the drive has not been unplugged or accessed by anything else since OS X itself last did so -- alas, for the likes of Save As ... dialog boxes, we still get a several-second Finder UI "lock up" -- usually accompanied by "the spinning beach-ball of death" -- while the OS merely waits for the external USB drive to spin up and say, "Yup. Still here. Nothing has changed and all is well. Carry on!", before finally presenting the list of places I might want to save my file at.Â
This happens in all applications, apparently any and every time the OS wants to refresh the list of available storage devices. So it's obviously an OS X cache/driver issue, as opposed to anything in user-land. Wouldn't you agreed?Â
I guess my first question would have to be, "Is there something I've not been able to find, which I can in fact already do to fix this problem?"
I know it's not just me, actually, because we have five (5) Macs in and about the home office, which all exhibit this highly frustrating behavior. Two use Seagate USB drives (one is 5.25", the other 3.5") while two others use Western Digital drives and the final has two Samsung drives, in custom enclosures. In fact, that last machine -- with an second drive solely for additional mass storage -- has us waiting while both drives spin up, in turn, which is frankly just terrible.
Indeed, the retired TV producer gentleman who owns this particular machine, swears that his iMac is, "the worse Mac I've ever owned", solely because of this problem of, "... constant $@#% delays ...", as he puts it.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to convince the old fellow that doing a full system re-install is highly unlikely to fix his problem. He harkens back to the days of OS 7?P.S: While I remember it -- there's another problem you might have come across, whereby if an external display is connected but turned off, the UI (mouse pointer etc) continuously pauses about even second or so, forcing me to either unplug the external (DVI) display or leave it turned on, even when I'm not using it for hours on end. This one is not nearly such a biggie as the USB drive one, in my view. But a curiosity, none the less.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 16GB RAM
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Apr 12, 2009
original 2.66 dual mac pro and for the longest time the mac would randomly lock. It would be on for a couple of days and just lock, sometimes it would be a few weeks. I checked the console and did not see anything as to why, just that the logs stopped.I started by taking out drives (have 3 drives) which did nothing, then i started with the ram. I've got 2gigs of apple ram (4x512s) and 2x2gb of non apple ram. I first removed a gig of the apple ram (2x512) and noticed from multiple weeks it doubled the time i would see lock ups (could be a coincidence). I finally removed the last 2 sticks of apple ram and my machine hasn't locked up since.
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Aug 9, 2010
my 2.4ghz 3 year old macbook pro is experiencing a lot of graphics errors and lockups recently, where the screen will turn garbled and such and the computer will freeze. Keep in mind this is the 8600m gt. However, I just got the nvidia fix done for free by apple a couple months ago. Is it possible it could be the same problem?
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Jul 22, 2009
Something has happened/changed on my iMac whereby my system locks up so tight that I cannot force quit anything, or do anything else to the system. My only option is to manually reboot.This started last week and I thought I had removed/uninstalled the offending program (iStat Menu) but tonight my system did it again.Any good place to start to keep/start troubleshooting?
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Feb 21, 2009
My iBook G4 randomly locks up. No kernel panic message. It is as if there is a pause button that is getting pushed on the screen and when it locks up if it is playing music it plays about 1 second then repeats.it makes it take longer to lock up but it still locks up. I have tried bigger shims and that does not help. If I try to install Leopard on the iBook it doesn't even make it 25% before locking up.
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Apr 18, 2009
I don't mean to start a new Thread but I think this one could really pinpoint the problem if we could get some good feedback on this. What is the Common Denominator (besides having the HD4850 option) that could be causing the lockups that some people are having.
Examples Is everyone who is experiencing lockups :
1.) Installed Boot Camp and using Windows with this HD4850 option?
2.) Do you use Safari exclusively and not FireFox?
3.) Does it happen only when Surfing ?
4.) Does it happen only when playing a certain game like WOW?
5.) Does it happen only after you been using the iMac for a few hours?
so on. . .
See my point? Write down or make yourself notes to as what you were doing exactly when it locked up? Reply to this Thread and lets figure this out. It will be must easier if everyone could put their situation in this Thread and maybe we can get to the bottom of this.
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Sep 6, 2009
Today I went to plug in my Lacie 250 GB USB external hard drive into my 13 in. MacBook to get a shirt template for a design I am making. I discovered that the hard drive just would not mount and show on the desktop, and I remembered that this happened a few days before, but all I did was unplug it and plug it back in, and it worked... except that today, that didn't work at all. I tried the other USB port, and the hard drive showed up on the desktop for about a second, and then disappeared. I kept on replugging it back into both USB ports, but nothing happened.
Then I tried to see if it would work on the PC beside me, and it was recognized as an external device; however, a message came up telling me the drive was malfunctioning. I am guessing this is from ejecting it incorrectly (because I am in a hurry to head to my next classes...I use this laptop at school), but I have incorrectly disconnected it before in the past and this problem never happened to me before.
Every single project I have ever created for my design career is on that hard drive, and all I want now is to get my files back. All I need it to do is show up on the desktop for just the right amount of time for me to copy my files onto my computer.
I read online to put it into the freezer for a while and it should mount, but that didn't work. I tried using Disk Warrior, Data Rescue 3, and Tech Tool Deluxe, but the hard drive did not show up on any of those apps.I tried plugging the hard drive into an iMac as well, but it did not show up either.
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Sep 1, 2009
Got a new MBP last month to replace my white MacBook - loving it as an upgrade but one gripe - if I'm sat using it on my knee I regularly hear the "click" type noise of what I imagine is the protection of the hard drive because it thinks it is being dropped.
I never heard this on my old Mac and while it's not a huge issue it is a bit disconcerting, as though I'm being told off for moving it in a fairly responsible way.
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Sep 9, 2009
My PowerBook G4 (Alum) died. I've had it for 4 years, taken it with me to Alaska and all over the lower 48, and have had nothing but happy experiences. I knew she was gonna go, but I was hoping she'd hold on until I could afford a MacBook. Alas, no. The problem appears to be the ability of the logic board to communicate with the hard drive. I can hear the HD spin, but even with Disk Warrior, I cannot locate it. The Mac Geniuses at my local Apple store confirmed this and gave me a shoulder to cry on. I've run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility, and tried finding it using the target disk mode - no luck.
The problem is that I've got 4 years of teaching materials, 6000 songs, and irreplaceable pictures on the HD, so I can't bring myself to just trash it. It's true that you only fail to back up you stuff once. This is my once. I've heard that with PC hard drives, you can just drop the old HD into a USB HD box and use it as an external HD. I can't afford professional data retrevial, and I want to give this option a try if it'll work with a Mac HD. Any ideas or suggestions?
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Jun 3, 2012
How do i play media files from my external hard drive without transferring the files to my mac hard drive? I have a lot of media files and want to be able to play them soley from my external hard drive.Â
Info:
iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), iOS 5.1.1
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Nov 22, 2006
My PM G5's Hard Drive has been making wierd noises lately and I'm really beginning to worry that it's failing. How can I be sure?
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Jul 27, 2009
I have an aluminum unibody macbook from October 2008. I'm looking to upgrade the 160 GB hard drive inside to a 500 GB one I'm considering from Newegg. Would it be possible to migrate/copy/clone the entire contents of my current hard drive to the 500 GB one? I also have a section of my current hard drive partitioned for Bootcamp. Would this affect my ability to transfer everything over?
If this is possible at all, how can I go about doing so? If there are steps laid out somewhere, I'd appreciate a referral. Sorry if my question is a little elementary, but I did a search on these forums and also google and nothing really came up
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Sep 9, 2009
I know this is going to be an incredibly easy fix, but I can't find it. The Hard Drive on my new iMac is not appearing on my desktop, nor is it appearing in the "Device" menu in Finder.
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Nov 12, 2009
if i delete files off my internal hard drive (Macintosh HD), will it still be on my external hard drive or will it just add to it?
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Mar 9, 2012
I have just installed a new hard drive in my imac intel 20" (2006) and upgraded the memory and now the hard drive does not show up in the 'select destinations' folder of the install program. I can see the hard drive in the disk utilities window however it wont let me do anything.It is a seagate 1TB SATA II drive however it is displaying it as a 7.3 TB.I have tried to erase and partition and get the same error message each time, 'Input/Output error'.
I have tried starting the thing with the install disk which is Mac OS X (Tiger?) which came with the computer
Info:
iMac
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Oct 14, 2009
with cloning/copying the content one an external hard drive onto a new external hard drive. Basically, I have a 500GB FW400 drive which I use to store my media files. It's full, so I purchased a 1TB FW800 drive to replace it. Obviously, I thought I could simply copy and paste the media files from the old drive to the new one.I cannot copy the media files to my internal drive first as my internal drive is only 250GB and nearly full itself.I have used Disk Utility to attempt to close the old drive to the new drive, but keep getting "insufficient space" errors.
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Mar 31, 2012
Recently I bought 2 identical WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drives for my macbook pro 13 inch 2010. My aim is to replace the internal hard drive with one of the two I just purchased and use it as my system drive with Lion, Windows and Data partitions. And for the other hard drive I want to use it as a full disk back up for the internal drive (now 1TB hard drive). After I was done with setting up both windows and mac and data transfer, when I booedt into the recovery partition from the internal drive to clone the drive to the external drive, the disk utility gave me this error (Could not validate source - error 254). I also tried using Carbon Copy Cloner but it only could clone partitions, not the entire drive. Yesterday I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla. It worked fine until it had to clone an exFAT partition (my data partition). The exFAT partition appeared as 'RAW' partition in clonezilla. As a result, the whole partition appeared to be full and clonezilla had to copy every single blocks of data in that partition and the estimated time remaining was about 30 hours. So clonezilla is out too. Just want to ask if there is any program/application (bootable or not) which allows can do a full disk clone to an external hard drive.
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Sep 9, 2014
Macbook Pro 17" Early 2011Â
Notes. Failed HDD ASD Test.  A new hard drive was installed in September of 2011 after the previous hard drive failed. Having worked well until now the system seems to give the same problems as it had previously. I am wondering if this is a compatibility issue as others have pointed out. Â
I have been told by the technician my only option is to replace the entire hard drive again for the second time with a new one. However to my understanding a ASD test is very specific and this my not be necessary? Further I am attempting a final backup just in case. I don't have to take it in where I could just back it up myself without the system shutting down.
Info:
Mac Pro
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Jun 16, 2008
During last 6 months I saw at least 5 PowerMac G5 that shows the same malfunction symptom, hangups, no video, fans running at full speed. It seems to be the main board, and many of them are 2.0 dual version (different models) and today I have a 2.3 Dual processor with the same problem. Anyone has other experience like me?
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Oct 12, 2008
Lately I've been seeing some odd things on my screen. The appear randomly and can only be removed if I change the resolution of my screen (I guess thats the closest thing to a degauss button we have these days) but it always comes back within an hour or so. There is nothing that seems to specifically trigger it either. It shows up as blue on a dark color and yellow on light colors (see the images below).I have an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT in a 2.5 Ghz Quad PPC Powermac.
This has been going on since about the same time I updated to 10.5.5 but Im not so sure its a software glitch. A part of me is thinking that this is my video card's last gasps for air before it dies. BUT I can take a screenshot of it which makes me question the software aspect. I can only take a screenshot of it when I use the command for taking a shot of the entire screen (Command-Shift-3) and not the command for cropping your shot (Command-Shift-4).
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Jul 19, 2010
My Mac Pro 1,1 (two dual-core 3Ghz) has begun to have a blue screen flick on intermittently for a second or two. Sometimes the blue screen may not happen for over an hour and then it may happen a few times in a few minutes. I did a Safe Boot and reset the pram but there was no change. I was going to run Apple Hardware Test but after some Google searching it seems that Hardware Test probably won't spot the problem if it is the 7300GT video card I have in the machine - which is what I suspect is the problem. Based on doing a search of this forum and a Google search, it seems like the cheapest replacement I can get for the 7300GT is the ATI Radeon HD2600XT. (I don't do anything that needs a higher "power" video card.) Does anyone know if either one or both of these cards will work in my Mac Pro: [URL:...] If not, what cheap video card might you recommend for my Mac Pro 1,1 and where might be a good place to obtain it?
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Apr 9, 2012
I suspect my centre RAM slot (closest to HDD) is faulty or on its way out. Have been troubleshooting a problem and can only replicate it with this RAM slot occupied and the other empty. Error is flash video playback becoming juttery/sticking before continuing. Occasional kernel panic. Has anyone else had this problem before or experienced a dead RAM slot?
Info:
Macbook (early 2006), Mac OS X (10.6.4)
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Jun 24, 2012
my battery on my macbook is dying so fast! for example i had my mac opened and on facebook while iwas doing my make up and in a hour it went from 80% to 48% is that normal if not what can i do to make it last longer??
Info:
MacBook Air (11-INCH, MID 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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Aug 8, 2010
iMac Flat-Panel G4 1GHz, 1.25GB Memory, Built 2003, OS 10.4.11: the 17" flat-panel display has developed vibrating vertical red lines. I have saved an iMac G5 that died; can I use it just as a monitor for my G4?
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