This is a phenomenon that I have experienced on a Blue & White G3 and a Gigabit G4, and in OS 9 and OS X: Whenever the hard disk spins down, the mac goes really slow even after it spins back up. I have to set the Energy Saver settings to keep the HD and computer from going to sleep (same result when computer goes to sleep). The problem is only fixed after I restart the machine. Same result with different hard drives as far as I can tell. Does anybody else have any experience with this or any additional explanation?
Just picked a second hand g5 up which runs like a dream! One thing I have noticed recently after putting the machine on sleep is that it takes forever to respond after been woken. The display and desktop come on instantly but when I click a program all I get is the beachball, the hdd doesn't appear to spin up. Then about 5 minutes later you hear the hdd spin up and away we go back to normal. It doesn't do this all the time though!
Is it possible to manually put an external hard disk to sleep? Right now, I've already got "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible" checkmarked in the Energy Saver preference pane, and so they should sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity, but I'm wondering if it's also possible to do this manually whenever I want.
I just bought an external hard drive and it's already spinning constantly, compared to my current external which is completely quiet, so I'm wondering if I can put it to sleep when I need to to stop it from spinning all the time.
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 3.2 GHz Intel Core i3, 16 GB RAM
I put it on Craig's list so wanted to wipe the drive and figure I'd play around with OS 9 a little just for fun. While in OS 9 it prompted me to upgrade the firmware on the DVD-ROM drive. I thought that sounded like a good idea since it makes some terrible noises when a disc is in... anyway, I did the firmware upgrade and everything went fine. That's the only real change I can think of that might have contributed to this new issue.Anyway, after that I put 10.3 on it again (I had 10.4 on it before) and it wouldn't sleep correctly. Everything looks like its going to sleep ok, then the hard drive spins up, then back down, over and over again endlessly.
Could really use some advice on a PowerBook problem! Unfortunately the PowerBook in question (12" G4) belongs to my mum who lives a fair distance away, so I've not been able to do any 'hands on' diagnostics. Basically she was using the machine yesterday when it randomly started emitting a high pitched squeaking/scratching sound (she described it as screaming though, bless). She called me and I asked her to turn it off - gave it a couple of minutes and asked her to try turning it on again. When she did the computer immediately started making the same noises (even before the startup 'bong' sound). Today one of her friends who is a little tech savvy took a look at it, and figured it must be the hard drive. Fortunately he was able to retrieve all of the important data from the computer whilst enduring ear-splitting screeching.
1. Does it sound like the problem really is the hard drive? It does to me, though I'm not an expert - however would hate to waste money on a replacement drive to find out that wasn't the problem in the first place.
2. Is it worth replacing the drive? Any idea how much it would cost to replace the disk? Is it something that could be done by myself, or would we need to find a specialist repair person to do it? Would it likely be more cost effective to get a new laptop?
The money issue is pretty key as she's in something of a tight spot at the moment, so trying to find the cheapest solution that will get her computer working again asap. As she lives in a rural area and is housebound her laptop is very much a lifeline for her, so would be good to get it sorted.
I am changin my iBook G4s hard drive. I am referring to a well written guide published on [URL]. But I am stuck on a step. For removing the front panel, there is screw hidden under a magnet. Somehow I can not remove that magnet. I have tried using L end keys, screw drivers, nose pliers and even a powerful magnet. This disk would not come out!
I have a dual 1.25 ghz MDD Powermac G4. It was working fine until a couple of days ago. It froze up, I restarted it. I got a blank blue screen.
Also, the computer made some awful clicky noises that I've never heard before.
I booted from the OS X installation CD. Disk utility lists the WD1800 hard drive, but I can't do a re-install and there's no option to repair it.
I can't erase or partition it because when I try, I get a failure message saying it can't be done ("chosen size not valid for chosen filesystem"). The HD is listed in system profiler... with a capacity of 0 bytes.
I assumed that the hard drive had died, so I went to a local PC shop and bought the only IDE drive they had (a Maxtor 6l250r0). I installed it, then booted from the OS X CD.
I know that new hard drives need to be formatted, but I assumed that this could be done with disk utility.
But disk utility can't find the new hard drive, doesn't list in the left column. It shows the optical drives and the install CD and the old WD hard drive which can't be erased or repaired, but no new hard drive.
It's not listed in the system profiler, either.
I checked the cable connections and tried installing it in the front carrier rather than the rear, but nothing works - disk utility and system profiler can't recognize it.
The only other desktop mac I have access to right now is my old 450 mhz Sawtooth G4. I tried putting the HD into the sawtooth and got the same results - disk utility and system profiler can't find the new HD at all, but has no trouble finding the old 20gb HD and the DVD and zip drives.
I'm... not really sure what to do here. Am I doing something wrong?
my clamshell iBook [URL]I am looking desperatley for a CD ISO that i can burn that will let me run disk utilities on my hardrive. if you have any software like this?
So so annoyed right now. Today my 12" G4 powerbook started to become slow, lots of spinning wheel, delayed menus etc. I checked file permissions, rebooted and it just kept on getting slower. Eventually it wouldn't get past the white apple screen.
I booted off the Tiger DVD and ran disk utility to fix and repair permissions again. It wouldn't let me repair the disk as I kept getting this error:
'Repair volume failed with error could not unmount disk'
I had to reboot again, and eventually my hard disk no longer appears in Disk Utility. I tried to boot into safe mode and get this:
'"I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus I0ATAController device blocking bus"
So now I pretty much can't do anything with it. Failed Hard Drive?
I am copying my DVD collection to the computer to be able to play on an iPod and a mac mini hooked up to the hdtv. Mainly TV shows.I have a Mac Pro with 2 DVD drives. The first one is the original drive (Pioneer DVR-111D) and the second is a Pioneer DVR-116D which I added. I intended to use this 2nd drive mainly for ripping DVDs because I knew I would have to update the firmware to get rid of riplock.
On the DVR-116D drive, I updated the firmware to remove riplock so it would not be limited to 5x read. I have not updated the firmware on the original DVR-111D drive. I am using fairmount to rip the DVD.Under OS X just ripping the DVD to the hard drive takes maybe 20-30 minutes. MacTheRipper is just as slow as is making a disk image using disk utility. I boot into Vista and use DVD Extractor and the same DVD takes 7 or 8 minutes .
Why is it so slow or is there a faster method of ripping a DVD on OS X?
Hey guys, i got an old Powerbook that the whole family use to surf the net. I notice its been super slow lately. Ive never had a problem with this notebook, I've only done 2 reinstall in the time ive owned it. I recentluy did another one, and notice its still slow, loading websites is slow, cant watch movies on it. This is a notebook i use to do photoshop and illustrator work on.
Do you think its just its time? I think it could be the hard drive or memory, is there any type of diagnostic i can do to find out what the problem is?
I just got a 15inch MacBook Pro 2.4 i7 quad. The computer is very fast when I just turn it on. If the computer goes to sleep and I wake it up, everything becomes very slow. I believe this is an issue with Lion. Also all the software is up to date. have to turn the computer on and off everytime I want to use it.
Info: MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Does anyone else notice the MBA takes a long time to reconnect to your wifi network after awaking from sleep? I'd say it takes 10-15 seconds vs. a MBP which takes less than 5 seconds.Not a huge deal, but I'd say it's one of the slowest notebooks I've used to reconnect to a wifi network.
My new i5 iMac has been really slow after I get out of its screensaver or take it out of sleep. Even if its on the screensaver for a minute, moving the mouse causes it to freeze and try to load the desktop. This takes about a minute before my computer is fully functional again. Also, I don't know if this is just me thinking this or if its actually a problem, but the computer seems a lot slower than my previous, a 24" 3.06Ghz iMac.
Another thing, the fans seem to spin a lot more with this computer. Watching a YouTube or Hulu video makes the fans spin a ton. I've never had that happen with a Mac before. The computer also gets literally too hot to touch. Anybody else have this?
Also, on a (kind of) unrelated note, Windows performance with this is horrible. I've tried Windows 7 and Vista, and both run... adequately. The fans also spin a ton in Vista (what I currently have installed due to there being no 27" drivers for 7 yet).
My MBP (about 2 years old, Santa Rosa) is having some major issues both starting up and going into sleep. First off, I'm using 10.5.8, everything's updated, I don't have a bunch of stuff on the startup processes (quicksilver and iTunes helper) and I'm plugged into a power source. When I start my computer (since yesterday) it has been taking an abnormally long time at the grey screen before the Apple, the grey screen with the apple and the rotating wheel, and then it goes to a light blue screen for 5 or so minutes (repeat: minutes) until flashing light and dark blue and finally taking me to the login. Not only that, but my computer will not go to sleep when I close the lid. Instead, the screen turns off and the hard drive and fans keep chugging. What's more annoying is when I then try to open the lid to manually turn it to sleep, the screen won't turn on. This usually requires a hard reset, which then takes 10 minutes to start up.
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.
So i put the OSX disk in (10.3) and when i make it boot from the disk the mac logo pops up then it shifts a quarter inch to the right and freezes. I then tried booting it normally and pressed the install button now it boots off the CD automatically with the same result and can't be turned off. Is there an emergency disk remove thing for a powerbook G4? And is there a way to reformat my computer without the disk?
I am considering purchasing diskwarrior but want to make sure it can help my situation before I purchase it. My imac will not boot from the internal hard drive (Intel processor) When I use disk utility to try and repair the disk, I get error messages and it won't repair. I can see the HD but cannot repair it. When I connect using target mode with my mac book pro, the hard drive does not appear on my host (macbook pro) computer. I have reloaded OS X (Leopard) onto a firewire external drive and can boot my imac that way but I can not find my original internal Macintosh HD. Will disk warrior be able to help with this scenario. I would really like to access that internal Macintosh HD and retrieve my files.
I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio FW800 external that has 5 partitions, connected to my 2011 iMac. I had help doing the partitions and don't really remember the reasoning, but one is just for my SuperDuper! backup, one is Miscellaneous, one for movie clips off my camcorder, one for misc scanned photo's and one for my genealogy research. I back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule and also to this WD hard drive with SuperDuper!
Recently I'm getting a pop up message that "Mac OS X can't repair the disk "Genealogy"'. And it needs to be reformatted. It's become a read only disk. When I look in Disk Utility it shows all the partitions as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" EXCEPT for the one in question. I also noticed that there are a lot of files with "date created" being the same date in 1969! These files may be letters I've written or photo's I added to that partition within the last few years.
I think I have to completely reformat the entire external hard drive to repair this, but I want to make sure. Because it's going to be a major hassle backing it all up to another external (having to get one first) and then figuring out how to make the files that have turned "read only" in that one partition, back to their original state! Does this sound right, that I have to reformat the entire external hard drive? And how do I get the read-only files back to their original state.
I'm hoping I can get some ideas and guidance on this. A few months ago I bought my wife a 17" MBP. At the time we had a D-Link DIR655 Wireless-N router and the MBP worked great with it. If I woke the machine from sleep the reconnection to the wireless network was pretty much instantaneous.
Unfortunately that router started to flake out and I replaced it with what is considered to be a top of the line router, Netgear WNDR3700. This router has a dual N band. One band is N only the other one is B/G/N. I have attached the MBP to both networks.
When the MBP wakes up it takes up to a minute for the wireless to be re-established. Weirdly it will reconnect to the SECOND of the two networks that are listed in priority order on the advanced wireless settings.If I remove either of the two networks and only have one listed, sometimes the MBP will take over a minute to eventually get reconnected.Does anyone have any thought on this? It's very frustrating and I haven't figured out why the reconnection is so slow with this very high end router. All my other wireless devices maintain their connection to the router very well with no drops or reconnects.
Recently I purchased an external hard disk, to put all of my pictures of my baby due to space limitations on my internal laptop drive. Since my Canon camera 10 megapixel pictures take up a ton of space this was occurring at an alarming rate. My intention was also to back up to DVD but never got to it. This is both a comment and a question.
Now said baby, is getting really good at pulling cords etc. He managed to do this on the external drive firewire cable. As far as i know the drive was not in the process of actually writing. However, after a few minutes and trying to re-plug the drive the OS crashed with a Grey Screen of Death hardware error that tells you that you need to push the power button..
This apparently corrupted the drive's directory. Upon reboot the drive would not mount. Since there were time machine backups on the drive too Diskwarrior was not able to reconstruct the drive in the built in memory available on the computer. Time machine stores millions of files and Diskwarrior apparently wants to keep it all in memory at once. Since my computer has 2GB you would hope that would be enough but apparently not. So that failed. Other utilities seemed to be able to find the files but not restore the directory. I also took it to the apple store they were not able to recover it.
I have to say this is extremely distressing, and hard to believe that a simple accident like this could cost the loss of thousands of pictures. I did send it to a rescue company but that was expensive but I think apple needs to do something about this situation.
On Windows there is a way to disable the write cache for external drives. This is not available for Mac OS X. This would prevent this rather common occurrence of a plug accidentally becoming disengaged when the drive is not in the process of writing. This reduces the odds but I still think apple, in order to become clearly superior, needs a better solution.
I know Apple has experimented with ZFS would this not eliminate this possibility of this kind of disaster? Is this in Snow Leopard desktop? I know they are thinking this is a business customer focused technology but clearly if it can eliminate this kind of thing then I think it is extremely useful to their non server customers. Perhaps there are other ways of dealing with this issue but ZFS is designed to deal with these issues. HFS+ is extremely fragile to disk corruption.
I know my situation is not that uncommon and this is not the first time this has happened to me with an external drive. You would think I had learned. I hate to think of how many other people have had the same thing happen to them.
I've download a Seagate Diagnostics programme to check whether my external Seagate FreeAgent Desk is working properly or not. However, when I run the programme, it indicates that cannot find the disk.
Both were checked (with Disk Utility and DiskWarrior) and are OK. But only one of the two disks shows in the Startup Disk list in System Preferences->Startup Disk.
I have a Seagate 1 TB Backup Plus Drive which was working perfectly fine until I plugged it into a USB hub. It detected it while in the hub and I was able to get files off of it, but when I ejected it from the hub and put it back into the USB slot on the computer it was not detected by finder. It shows up in the disk utility and I clicked verify and repair and it says:
Verify and Repair volume “Seagate Backup Plus Drive” Checking file system Volume repair complete. Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Is there any way to get this to work properly again? Or if not is there a way for me to recover my files on the external hard drive?
I have a Macbook PRO late 2011 running OS X Mavericks.
I have a Macbook Pro . The hard disk failed smart disk and my laptop does not start any more. Is it ok if I replace the HDD with CGET or WD hard disk rather than the apple hard disk. the pros and cons of a non apple HDD.
I ran installer then went to disk utility and pushed disk repair. it ran and indicated in green that no repairs were necessary. i then went to startup disk and only the Diks and network startup showed up but no hard drive. i also open computer to make sure was not wet muddy due to leak in cooling system but all was dry
I am trying to repair my mac. But in disk utility, the hard disk is not visible to proceed. Its showing disk0 -> volume with only 1.79GB. and all the options are disabled. The capacity of my mac book pro was 500GB.
