Software :: IMac Froze When External HD Plugged In - Cannot Open Finder
Nov 7, 2010
I plugged in an external hard drive into my imac. Then all the sudden it froze. I restarted it and all my desktop icons are gone, I cant open finder or the trash. The bar at the top of the screen that has the time is gone / I have no idea what happened, or how to fix it.
Just purchased and hooked up a WD 2tb MyBook Studio Edition II external HD, the drive spins down on the HD but my iMac doesnt sleep while its plugged in.
We have an iMac G5 running 10.4.11 which developed some nasty colour banding down the screen and have now plugged in an external display. How can you turn off the iMac display so it only outputs through the external monitor?
I upgraded the ram to 4gb crucial on my 24" intel imac (early 2008). Now it freezes at apple screen, but only if my external WD My Book hard drive is plugged in via firewire. If I unplug it from the firewire port.
I noticed that this problem started last night. When I open anything in Finder or a folder on the desk top and double click it doesn't open. But on the desktop,if I right click the folder and click open it opens. But in finder it doesn't. I have shut down the computer and waited and re-started but still no help. This also happens when I use pages, and numbers.
I accidentally quit finder instead of Safari this morning and now Finder will not open. I still have it in the dock but nothing will work. I also do not have the toolbar at the top either. I can still open the other icons on the dock and use them so I can get on Safari, Ical, etc. I thought I did this once before but I can't remember what I did to rectify the situation.
earlier I tried emptying my trash and my cursor started spinning and hasn't stopped I've tried to open finder and won't, tried to hop online and no luck.
My dashboard widgets froze -- open on screen. I had to close each widget.Now I now longer have one-click pop up of my selected widgets.I get a beep when I click the dashboard icon. I have to click the plus sign and open individual widgets.
I have a 2011 Imac and was on the youtube watching a music video when all of a sudden my screen COMPLELETY froze, and a loud clicking noise kept repeating itself nonstop from the speaker, I'm not sure if the sound was coming from the song OR my computer actually making the noise itself. I held down the power button and waited a couple minutes and restarted. The white screen came on with the apple logo, but all of a sudden it completely froze, I waited a few minutes and powered off. I now waited 5 minutes and restarted and it WORKED! Everything seems fine?
Has it frozen more than once since the time you've received it. Hopefully we can get some idea of what's going on. specify what CPU your system is running (2.93 or 3.06 ghz), along with info when you ordered the system, and when it was shipped.
I have 2 usb drives attached to my iMac which is running snow leopard. I am trying to share the hard drives so i can install some software on my Macbook but i cant see the drives in my finder on the macbook. I have checked all the settings on my imac and everything is shared properly but i still get nothing.
Sometimes I simply cannot open a new finder window. If I use Command-N or if I choose New Finder Window in the Finder menu, nothing happens. If I am using Command-N, I can see the File heading in the Finder menu bar highlighting, and then after a few seconds the highlight goes, but no window opens. Also, clicking on my Downloads icon in the dock, the dialog opens showing all the files, but if I then click on Open in Finder, the dialog closes but nothing happens. Now that I am writing this message, it all works again! That's what I mean by 'sometimes'. This issue can last for tens of minutes. Secndly, and this is still a problem, my finder Preferences do not stick. So for instance, I don't want to see an icon for my hard disk on the desktop, so I untick this in Finder preferences. The icon disappears. If I now re-start, then it comes back. The same happens for removing the empty trash warning and all of the other Finder Preference tick boxes.
Now, when the first problem of not being able to open a finder window suddenly stopped being a problem, the icon for the hard disk suddenly appeared on my desktop. So the two issues are linked. This has been going on intermittently for a few days. I have verified my disk, and repaired permissions.
I was playing Diablo II and my screen froze, and the same half second blip of sound kept playing over and over. I couldn't even force quit, so I held down the power button until it turned off.
Now, it won't turn on. When I press the power button, there is no chime. Oddly there are an inordinate number of fan wooshes. Like, I hear a woosh from the right, which is normal, but then I hear a woosh from the left, then another in the middle! I am being bombarded with wooshes!I've tried holding alt, or holding shift, or holding alt+s while starting up. No dice, although I do get fewer fan blasts, which is normal.
So I have an i5 27" that came with 4GB RAM (two 2 gig chips). I ordered two more 2 gig chips for a total of 8. When I went to install the two new ones, I followed logical steps. Remove the flexible plastic strip, slide the ram into the slot. However, the ram doesn't click, slide, or pop into place, in any way. I have tried both sides, and I have tried flipping the ram over and doing it backwards. I tried booting the computer with them in there even though they weren't settled in and it froze. I took them out, put the cover back on, and rebooted, and now every time I boot i get a meter that takes forever to fill up. Once booted, the computer does work normally. What am I doing wrong? And how can i fix this painfully long boot process? What have i done.
My imac has just all of a sudden stopped working out of the blue. It was working fine yesterday and then just froze with the spinning wheel of death.
After a long long time it still was frozen so i held power button for 4 secs to power down.
PS: i am running snow leopard up to date on both macs.
I tried to power up and it has random start up issues.
1) It sometimes has the flashing folder with question mark and grey/white screen
2) It sometimes has the plain blue screen
3) It once out of the last 30 attempts to boot goes to the desktop and i noticed my wallpaper had been reset to default mac one. - Every move i made had the spinning wheel and i did not get past loading Firefox and it froze again.
I have tried resetting the PRAM from boot disk but did not help. I ran Disk Utility from boot disk and repaired permissions and disk. No change in imac..
I have also tried pulling out one o the 4gig rams and booting and still the same problem so im guessing the ram is ok??
I have tried connecting imac to my macbook pro via 6 pin firewire cable and booing the imac into Target mode but the imac never appears on the macbook pro desktop to access files. The cd-rom appears showing the disk in the imac and i could eject it from the macbook pro. So looks like the target mode boot works, kind of..
I am running out of options and found out today my imac is not under warranty anymore.. !!!!! $%#%$#%
I just received my refurb 2.8Ghz 24" iMac today. I have been setting it up and transferring files to it for the last few hours. I just installed 4GB of RAM from Crucial to upgrade from my 2GB that came preinstalled. I opened Hulu and started watching a video full screen while I was working on something in the same room. All of a sudden the playing video froze and there was a loud high pitched squeal coming from the speakers and some crackling, followed by another high pitched squeal from the speakers and then the computer froze.
I know it wasn't a fan noise or a hard drive noise, it was definitely a high pitched audio tone and crackling from the speakers when it hung up. The only way I could make it stop is to hold down the power button and turn it the iMac off. I wonder if it could have been my photo collage screensaver kicking in while the hulu video was playing fullscreen that caused something to lock up? It seems like it was in the timeframe from when I walked away from the computer to the time it crashed.
I'm using an external hard drive for mac backup and also to store photo files. I copied some photo files to the drive about two weeks ago and their icon appears, but when I want to open them, I get an error message: "The alias “...” can’t be opened because the original item can’t be found." There is also a small arrow on the icon. My other files can be opened okay.
What's also strange is that I found the icon of the external drive in the folder with the picture files, even though I did not drag it there (the main icon is till on my computer's desktop, where it should be.) That icon also has a small arrow on it. When I click on it, it opens and I can see my folders, but the photo folders with the arrow on it will still not open.
I tried ejecting the drive and reconnecting it, but it didn't work. Is there anything I can do to recover the missing photo files, or are they most likely gone? I have deleted these pictures from my computer hard drive. What should I do about the mysterious second external drive icon? Delete it or keep it? Can I somehow use it to restore the photo files?
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.4 GHZ Intel Core Duo 6GB RAM
I have this gorgeous 22" ACD that I have plugged into my G5, where I use it quite often. But my intention for the G5 was to be a server, which it is. I often need some extra display space when I'm doing school work, or coding, so I was wondering if there is a way that I can use the display, while plugged in to the G5, as an external display for my MBP. Preferably something that I could stream over my local network.
I'm running SL. I have a MBA, an iMac, and a LaCie external drive. I want to plug the MBA into the USB port on the external drive and the iMac into one of the Firewire 800 ports on the external drive. (On the LaCie, I have two backup partitions for each of the computers -- one for ? backups and one for a CarbonCopy clone of the computers.) When I connect them this way, the iMac can see the drive, but the MBA can't. The MBA will see the drive only if I unplug the iMac from the drive. Is there some sort of trick for getting both computers to see the drive at once? I don't care if they see all four partitions; I'd just like the MBA to be able to see "its" TM and CCC partitions on the LaCie and the iMac to see "its" partitions.
I've got a simpletech 2tb hard drive which I've used for time machine, but all of a sudden it won't read when I plug it in. I can hear it power on when I plug it in but it won't show up. I've tried plugging in other devices to make sure the ports are still good and tried restarting with and without the hard drive plugged in. I've only had this hard drive a week and haven't done any improper device removals to it. Also, I am running snow leopard with all the updates.
I have a new iMac with MS Office for Mac 2011. When I go to finder and click on a document the computer opens all word docs. How do i stop this behavior?
I've noticed a faint buzzing sound through my external speakers when a charger is plugged in to the laptop. Removing the charge kills the noise and makes the sound crystal clear again. Doesn't bother me to much, but as my uni-macbook pro is plugged in most of the time I can see this near constant buzz getting on my nerves a bit in the future. Any ideas, looking back I experienced the same thing with my macbook.
I have put contents of an external hard drive in the trash but not yet deleted them. How do I remove them from the trash (not delete them) as every time I plug the hard drive into the Macbook pro they show up in the trash again. I do not want them deleted.
I recently bought a new Mac mini and Seagate goflex 3TB external hard drive. The computer is awesome but if I have the external hard drive plugged in, it messes with the restart/shutdown. The mac will act like it's powering down and go to the blank white screen but will never turn off and shows the little gray lines that go in that circular motion at the bottom of the screen. If I disconnect the USB from the Mac then it completes its power down. I've tried the suggestions of repairing disks or disk permissions, as well as resetting the PRAM, which have worked sometimes but the the problem reoccurs. I've also tried ejecting the external hard drive before shutting down on the Mac but I'll either get an error message or nothing happens and then the above shutdown issue occurs.
Why does this happen and what can I do so that I can always have the external plugged in and not have to manually unplug it so the Mac can shutdown?
I have to have my hard drive replaced on my Macbook Pro. I bought an external hard drive (Buffalo) plugged it in and nothing no pop ups for instructions. Does a new hard drive (external) need something done to it on first time use?