OS X :: System Freezes Up While Update / Hard Drive Disapears After Sleep?
Dec 20, 2009
So, I just had the original 300 GB hard drive fail in my aluminum 24" inch Mac running the latest update of Leopard. I wasn't able to save it using diskwarrior (diskwarrior said it was some sort of mechanical failure) but I was able to recover most of the data from it by booting from an external hard-drive.
So I went out and purchased a brand new Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive. The install went fine, it found the drive partitioned it and installed Leopard successful. Then is crashed and disappeared when I left it alone to run all the software updates. I came back and the computer was stuck on "Restart Required" after downloading all the updates.
I went to hit restart now, and the system just hanged, wouldn't do anything. So I hard powered down the system and restarted it. It came up with nothing, just stuck on the White Screen of Death. So I plugged the external drive back in and booted from it. Mac OSX couldn't find the drive and diskwarrior would crash if I tried to run it. I tried to boot up from the OSX start-up disk and it couldn't find the drive either.
So I took the case apart and made sure all the connections were solid and the drive was mounted correctly. Everything looked fine so I plugged it in and it started up fine. Finished the updates and the iMac ran great. So I thought maybe it was overheating, so I've installed smcfancontrol and started to monitor the temp of the drive. I also took the mac apart again and sucked out any dust in the fans or vents. The drive never goes over a 105 F, so it doesn't seem to be overheating.
However, this is where the problem is consistent: everytime the iMac goes into sleep mode, it crashes and the iMac is unable to find the hard-drive again. Unless I unplug it completely for 5 minutes or so. Once I unplug it, it finds the drive and operates like a champ.
I'm running out of space on my Mac Mini's disk because of all my iTunes video files. I am thinking about buying an enclosure for my spare 1 TB hard drive, and using it as the location of my iTunes library, but I wondered how it works with the Mac Mini's energy-savings mode. My Mini is set to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, then wake when iTunes content is requested by my Apple TV or Airport Express. I like it, because it's very energy efficient that way! My question is, will the disks also sleep along with my computer, and will they wake properly when the computer wakes?
It is incredible slow - freezes constantly unless on very low graphics in games like World of Warcraft so i'm assuming i need to upload graphics. So i went to the Nvidia website, and tried to update driver by following steps correctly, selecting the correct options, etc and it said it couldn't update for my system..How do i update my software so i can play without freezing?
Lately I've been using my external hard drive as the main drive of my imac I5 and every day it freezes when I open 3 or 4 apps or more or while doing several stuff at the same time. This, obviously, doesnt happen when using the internal hard drive of the imac, so I suppose is due to using firewire 800 or usb 2.0. Is it normal for every external hard drive to freeze when using it as the main drive or maybe is it that my external hard drive is bad?
I'm planning on buying a more quieter external hard drive to use as the main drive of my imac, but I wont do so if it also keeps freezing every day. Any suggestions? Is it normal even when using firewire 800? When using the external hard drive I umount the internal drive of the imac. Maybe this is the reason? Its a Lacie Big Disk 500GB. Would an external SSD make a difference or would it still freeze?
Eventually but not immediately whenever my Western Digital 1TB drive is plugged into my mac mini, any program accessing the external hard drive will freeze with related spinning beach ball. If I open the external drive it will not show that there are any files on it. If I manually unplug the drive, everything that was frozen magically unfreezes.
I keep seeing my poor iMac G3 Blueberry freezing for no reason, I have 512MB of ram, but I don't think I can max it, and if I did, the processor and hard drive and gonna die soon, It just freezes, and sometimes the screen will not wake when I move the mouse or touch the keyboard.
I recently installed a new 250 GB hard drive in my 800MHZ emac. I did a nice clean install of 10.4 on it and all was going well. The problem is that it randomly freezes after about 10 or 20 minutes. Mouse locks up, keyboard doesn't work.I tried pinging it from another computer and there was no response. I hold the power button in to shut it down and when it reboots it works fine for a while and then freezes again. I checked the console and it had this:
Mac OS X Version 10.4 (Build 8A428) 2006-02-10 20:36:25 -0500 2006-02-10 20:36:26.072 loginwindow[84] FSResolveAliasWithMountFlags returned err = -1407
I ran the disk utilty checks and they come up clean. I have tried reinstalling os x with no luck.
I've just got a new external HD, but it's not being recognised by Mac OS X (10.5.7). I assumed it was because it was in a Windows format, so booted Windows, but it then turned out it wasn't formatted at all. What is the easiest way to make this an HFS+ (the Mac OS extended format), and how do I do it as I can't see it anywhere on the Mac (including Disk Utility)?
When I eventually upgrade to Snow Leopard, I'd ideally like to do a fresh install (I did Tiger>Leopard as an upgrade install), but I really don't want to have to go through the hassle of reinstalling all my apps afterwards. So, would the following work as a best-of-both-worlds alternative?
1. Update my backup bootable system drive image on my external FW drive 2. Wipe the drive in my MBP and do a fresh install of SL 3. Use the Migration Assistant to automagically copy all my data and apps over from the backup drive as if I was upgrading from an old Mac to a new one
On paper at least, it looks like it ought to "just work"... but I'm wondering whether or not Migration Assistant will work between a Mac and an external drive, or does it have to be between two actual Macs?
I have resolved my MacPro sleep issue by removing the Seagate 320GB stock drive. For whatever reason, if that drive is plugged in, it reboots my MacPro when waking from sleep. I had setup 2 WD 500GB drives in RAID 0 as my boot volume and this was configured with Windows XP Pro for other uses.
My August 2007 MacBook runs OSX 10.4.10. It has performed flawlessly since my daughter bought it in 2007, and perfectly after I purchased it from her last september. The other night I was surfing the web while flying on a commercial airliner. (GoGoNet or something similar) Performance was kind of slow but I attributed that to the in-air wifi, which I had never used before. Then the browser started to hang with the spinning pinwheel. Option apple escape WOULD NOT force quit safari. After a few shutdowns using only the power button, the mac hung up on startup. I hear the chime, see the apple icon, the gear turns but it never goes past that point. It may be significant that the plane was flying through scary turbulence when my problems began.
When I boot up using the mac install disk 1, I can get it to start cleanly using the C key, the D key and NO keys. But when I run the hardware diagnostic, both short and long test, the mac comes up 100% clean. But i cannot see any test for the hard drive. When I try to run disk utility, the colored pinwheel arrives and it never goes away. When I go down the road of re-installing the system software, I cannot see the target drive.
When I put my ear on the deck, just to the right of the track-pad, I can hear the hard drive quietly spinning away with regular - not random - clicks.
I see that Apple is quietly replacing these hard-drives, but the affected computers seem to have a folder/question mark on the desktop on startup, not the apple/spinning gear.
I really would like to be able to recover my photos and some files if the hard drive is going to be swapped. But I am resigned to the situation that these un-backed-up files will be forever lost.
I bought a new internal hard drive for my late 2009 MBP and have completely cloned my existing hard drive to the new one. When I use the new hard drive through an enclosure I am able to boot from this hard drive perfectly, but when I install it into my MBP it won't read properly or something. It loads to my home screen with my dock, but when I try to click something, it just freezes up and I have to restart to the same thing every time. Anyone have any ideas on how this can be fixed?
For the last few days, since carrying out a software update (dont know what update!) when I select "sleep" from the main apple menu my screen goes to sleep but my hard drive keeps running, how do I correct this so the whole thing goes to sleep?
a couple of days before my wireless track pad and keyboard would have trouble connecting when computer is waken after sleep mode. Then one day my mac mini just suddenly stopped going in a physical sleep state. When I go to the apple sign and put the mac mini to sleep the screen turns black like usual but once its put to "sleep" the light indicator on the mac mini will not blink neither will I hear the hardrive slow down. whats going on. This is the standard $700 model mac mini mid 2011.
As I've read in many threads there's no way to turn off the blue light, even when my imac is off or sleep, and even thou the hdd is (or might) be asleep, the light always stays on... over all this is not a huge deal, but since the imac is in my room sometimes the light it's a little annoying. I was wondering if anyone here has an external hard drive that goes to sleep and even the lights turn off completely..
Specially if it's a famous brand.. like WD or anything along those lines.. since I'm looking to upgrade my external HDD i figured it's a good to know.. otherwise i'm going to just upgrade to the 1tb Lacie.. I'm considering the 1tb "My Book" because even thou I read that the 500gb had a lot of issues apparently the 1tb one is a lot better.. has anyone has had this drive? Any issues?
I have a new 17" MBP and recently it stopped going to sleep on its own. I can force it to sleep my apple menu or shutting the lid. I have tried everything I can think of... all programs closed, nothing running (to my knowledge) and in activity monitor it shows the disk activity writting every 20 seconds or so... my only conclusion is that it's not letting the HD become inactive long enough to send to sleep... can someone please help me with this?
I will try to be a little more clear in describing this one: I use a 500GB USB Hard Drive for storing Music, Videos, Photos, etc. I have my entire library for iTunes, iPhoto in there. Here's the problem. When I mount the drive to use it, it works fine. If I stop iTunes for 5 minutes or so and then try to open up another file from the drive I can hear the hard drive start to spin inside the enclosure, but it just hangs, forcing me to unplug it from the USB port, giving me the fail to eject warning message. When I re-mount it again it works fine, but I imagine doing this is damaging to the files and folders. Anybody else had this problem? Is there any way to adjust how much time of inactivity will cause the drive to sleep?
I just got a new Mac Mini, and I notice that when it's in sleep mode, the hard disk is constantly spinning up and then spinning down again. It spins down roughly every thirty seconds, the power light starts blinking in the "I'm sleeping" pattern, but then the drive spins back up in a matter of seconds and the light is on constantly until the next spin-down. I've tried turning off the network, disconnecting the display, fiddling with the Energy Saver settings, quitting all programs, all to no avail. All updates are installed.
I was using my Mac (Macbook Pro 15" screen) and tried opening a file in GarageBand, at which point a warning message came up saying something about a midi file and something not being allowed, and then froze, resulting in me having to switch the computer off from the power button and restarting (Sadly I didnt realise that this would be the start of a whole host of problems and didnt make a note of the warning message). After rebooting I got the 'stuck on the blue screen with the Apple logo and infinitly spinning wheel' problem that i've seen in a few posts. having tried numerous suggestions posted with no change I ended up taking it to the genius section of an Apple store. When i got it back they said that it may have been a corrupted file, and that they re-installed and reset the starting programs (Something along those lines, I cant quite remember). I can now get onto the computer and use it, though some new problems have arisen.......
I bought an optibay clone and put it in my 2010 Macbook i5. I have an SSD residing in my standard hard drive bay (because of potential hibernate issues) and the 5400rpm Apple drive + optibay clone in the Superdrive bay. How do I sleep/spin down the 5400rpm drive ? Unmounting doesn't seem to help. Put disk to sleep option in preferences is selected, but it keeps spinning and spinning. What options do we have for sleeping/spinning down this drive within OSX ?
The last couple of times I have woken my MBP up a box has popped up with a big red sign in the middle saying my external hard drive was removed unexpectedly and could have caused loss of data. I know this is not healthy and I would like to stop it doing this as soon as possible. It is connected via firewire 800 and is a western digital 250 gig my book pro if that makes any difference. I close the lid of my laptop with it still on and connected and everything is supposed to sleep. It used to work fine, I would open the lid and everything would wake up and I could do what I was doing before with no error messages and the hard drive would still be mounted on the desktop.
i dunno if this is new or everyone already knows bout it, but when i stacked one macbook air on top of the other with the bottom one sleeping, the one stacked on top also goes to sleep even if it was turned on. i tried this on a friends macbook air and this happens. is it coz of the magnetic fields in the hard drive? anyone with 2 macbook airs on hand should definitely try this.
I'm on an early 2008 mac pro - used to be on a Powerbook G4. I have a 300 GB LaCie d2 Extreme external HD connected via firewire 800. Both are in 10.5.2. While on my powerbook, the drive behaved normally - fell asleep after no use, then awakened when I needed to access something. On my new mac pro, the drive behaves strangely. I only use it for backup, so it's only accessed once a day. The rest of the time I do not use it. When it's not in use, the drive sporadically wakes and sleeps. I've tried to pinpoint the cause to no avail.
I've tried all the usual suspects: browsing the forums, checking the "hard disk sleep" preference in energy saver, switching the firewire 800 cable with usb and firewire 400, watching activity monitor to see if there's a program accessing the drive (haven't found anything, but that doesn't mean it's not there). None of it works.
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.
I've bought 8 months ago external hard drive Seagate FreeAgent 1TB (USB 2.0 7200 RPM 32MB cache), till last week disk was plugged in to pc and everything was great. Now its plugged to mac and the problem is, the hard drive all the time going to sleep after minute or two. I've turned off sleeping disk in system pref., also i used command sudo pmset -a disk sleep 0. App from seagate is a piece of **** I've made full format from ntfs to mac hfs. Nothing helped! Is there any solution to resolve my problem?
My computer (MBP 5,5) makes this sound several times throughout a day of use. It sounds exactly like the little "click" sound the computer makes, when i close the lid and have it go into sleep mode. I guess it's the hard drive going to sleep sound? If i'm right, i really don't understand why the hard drive goes to sleep at these random times. I've disabled that in System Preferences - at least i think so. It's this option, right?: [URL] Also, my MBP is always (only use it as a desktop with an external monitor connected to it) on a mStand on my table, so it can't be the Sudden Motion Sensor either.
Is there a way to disable hard drives from automatically going to sleep mode (spinning down). Energy saver (System preferences) already has "put hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible) turned off, so this must be done from the drive itself. The drives in question are a 3.5" ATA drive from Western Digital (WD5000AAKB) and a 2.5" Seagate SATA drive (Disk utility doesn't tell me which drive model it is, so I have to physically open the enclosure to find out). They're both placed inside external Firewire 800/USB enclosures.
Lately I've noticed that whenever I put my Mac to sleep, I lose a few megabytes. At first I didn't think anything about it. Until one day I let sleep for a while I was doing something, and came back to, and saw that I had lost about 300 megabytes. While it was in sleep, no applications were running and nothing was downloading. My mac is Macbook pro, 3 years old, 120 gigabyte, 2 gb of ram, 2.33 Ghz Intel Core duo, Model Identifier: 2,2, and Serial Number:W86481HGW0H Right now it's running leopard. I'm about to upgrade to Snow Leopard. So why would it lose this hard drive space when it's in sleep mode? By the way, I bought it used one year ago. So I've only had it a year. I haven't downloaded anything from any untrustworthy websites. I only download things from trusted sources(i.e. itunes.) Please help. Right now my only solution is to keep a close eye on it, and make sure that it does not go to sleep!
I have a 2008 Mac Pro with the original OSX drive and then two other hard drives, one I use for Boot Camp/Fusion and the other for my work files. Under Energy Save in system preferences, I have it so that the drives will sleep whenever possible. The issue I'm having is one of the drives, I think the one with my work files, will wake from sleep every 15 minutes or so even if I'm not accessing any of the files. I haven't timed it exactly but it's around 15-20 minutes and happens throughout the day. What is causing the drive to wake? I disabled iStat Pro because before the drives would spin every time I checked my dashboard so that's not the problem anymore.
