2009 MacBook Pro Freezing

Here's an even better idea. Because the computer is still in warranty take it to an Apple retailer or service center and have it checked.

If you have a drive that has a Sudden Motion Sensor then you have to disable it. Contact the drive's manufacturer to determine how to disable the sensor on the drive. If it cannot be disabled then swap it for a drive model without the sensor. A sensor on a hard drive will conflict with the one in your computer.

I'm curious to know, does your cpu spike every second. example, does it look like a bunch of mountains across a graph if you view the usage in a program such as istat pro etc.

I'm having the same issue as well as three of my friends, 2 with 15" macbook pro purchased after june as well as 1 with a 13" macbook pro.

Seems to have begun after 10.5.8?

I'm having the same issue with my new macbook 13" pro
any news on this?

Same here - June '09 Macbook Pro and constant freezes. It's driving me nuts.

The hard drive update has silenced my click and beep problem with my 17" w/ 7200 drive. I still have the random 30 second pauses. I get a spinning beach ball, drive access in Activity Monitor will drop to 0 and I still have around 10% on each of the processors during this pause, you can switch the frontmost application but you cannot do anything until it clears. The beach ball returns to a arrow and the drive immediately shows access in activity monitor.

There seem to be a number of people with this same issue in the click and beep post [http://discussions.apple.com/messageview.jspa?messageID=10027746] so I hope those who still have this problem will continue the discussion here and perhaps it will raise the issue with apple.

FOR ALL USERS HAVING TOTAL FREEZES (no beachball, just 5sec power-on button to restart helps) I MAY HAVE A SOLUTION...!!! (MBP 17" 3,06ghz 4gb-ddr3-ram 500gb 7200rpm june2009)

I recognized that my airport turns off automatically from time to time.. also it won't let me switch it on again afterwards.. in addition to that I had several of those total hangs when i clicked the airport icon in the menu bar...

I was hoping that Hard Drive Update 2.0 would fix this issues but it "just" removed the beeps n clicks successfully..

so... I connected my mbp via network cable, switched off airport and deleted it out of the network pref pane.. you can add it again after rebooting the system - i haven't rebooted by now!

BUT my system seems to work properly.. it's now running for several hours without any issues.. most of the time the freezes occurred while i was watching tv stuff via stream websites.. or when copying loads of GBs of files to my ipod.. but it seems to work right now..

so i really assume that it's the airport extreme causing all those freezing stuff... I don't know if that is right or will help anybody but hopefully it does because then we all would know where this issue comes from..

hope i could help at least some of you!

I too have gotten the 30 second beachball freezes. They most often occur in iPhoto when going through many photos in sequence. I assumed it had to do with iPhoto caching the next x number of Photos at full size, but now I'm not so sure because it hangs at other times too.

I am going to install the firmware update after I back up my drive, but many people in the click/beep thread report that it doesn't stop the freezes.

Just to say I have this exact same problem with the same symptoms. I don't really want to take it to an Apple Store because you tell it's the kind of thing that won't happen when it needs to.

I've got the same problem. 15" inch unibody MBP from July 09 with a 5400rpm 500gb harddrive. Sometimes it freezes ever few minutes and sometimes hours go by without any freeze. I've tried to detect any correlation with hard disk usage patterns and running applications but so far no luck... Nothing shows up in the console either to indicate any errors or i/o problem.

I've had the same problems with it freezing. But now I've gone several degrees stupider. I tried to repair the disk. It failed reporting an "Invalid Sibling Link" error. I tried to repair the disk again, using a second Mac through firewire, with the same error. Googling that I found this web page where others had success fixing the problem:
http://mahalkita.nanogeex.com/2007/09/28/how-to-fix-the-invalid-sibling-link-%20 error/
Following those instructions, which take you into "Single User Mode" which looks a lot like Terminal mode, I got the dreaded "invalid node structure" error. Repair failed. And so it did, my hard drive is now terminal.

On boot up I hear it go for a few seconds then stop. The boot up screen spins for upwards of five minutes (never a good sign), then the whole process quits. The computer shuts down without ever booting up (it also gets very hot).

The suggested solution to fix the problem is to use Disk Warrior from an external CD. I have Disk Warrior on the other Mac (the one I am writing from now) so I went back to firewire. On the Macbook, the firewire displays the same, but no drive arrives on the other Mac. In short, the drive does not seem to appear to either computer.

At least I do have a Time Machine. Any suggestions?

There is a 60+ page thread in here that is all about the 30 second beachball hangs.

That issue is completely different than the click/beep problem and affects a wide variety of drives, even stock drives from Apple.

The cause of the problem, in a nutshell, is that the EFI version 1.7 firmware is broken. And I suspect that many who have been focused on the click/beep problem will find they are affected by this firmware issue as well.

The only workaround at this point is to go into an Apple Store and have your firmware downgraded to version 1.6 (which will also limit your SATA interface to 1.5Gb/s). On the plus side, this downgrade only takes a few minutes, and is completely reversible if you change your mind (just install the firmware update again through Software Update).

Apple has not officially acknowledged this problem, much less said anything about fixing the broken firmware.

I put up a video of what this firmware issue looks like here: http://vimeo.com/5854152
If that looks like what you're seeing, make a genius bar appointment and ask them to downgrade your firmware. Also, write Apple some feedback ( http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html) and ask them to fix this issue.

Note that this issue ONLY affects mid-2009 13" and 15" MacBook Pros (the ones with the new SD card slot).

The same here , brand new MBP 2.53 15'' 4GB of ram , freeze with Quicktime and sometimes Complete freeze and need to turn off the Mac ... i am using VLC now i , with Perian or without the same problem.
i can't understand it ... i sent a feedback about the problem , maybe Snow Leopard with the new Quicktime will fix it ?

creativestuff - I've got the same Invalid Sibling Link error on an external drive. Mine occured right after upgrading to Snow Leopard. I've got a discussion here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2136307&tstart=0

I'll pass on any fix that ends up working...