Q: Random freezing from Snow Leopard - total lock-up for about 30 seconds

Have you thought of reverting back to 10.5 till Snow is more stable?

Dale

I will if the clean install doesn't work. If it doesn't lock up by Wed morning, that would be almost 5 continues uptime, I'll keep SL on, then load up Parallels 4 and Windows XP Pro. If it locks up then I know for sure is that addition thats causing the hard lock ups.

Forgot to add that doing a Clean Install, SL on the MBP run wickedly fast.

Message was edited by: SuperSizeIt

I have a late model 2008 13" Macbook Pro with 7200rpm 500Gb hard drive.

I have basically ran everything possible solution listed here in this forum, and as of last night, I have a corrupted hard drive where disk utility could not fix. So, I formatted hard drive to do a clean install of snow leopard and I cannot even complete an installation of SL. My computer is "bricked" and I will be taking it to the Genius Bar today for some assistance.

I was getting the beachball about every 5 minutes using my computer...and it did not matter what programs I was using...even "finder" would freeze. I will update after my appointment today.

Same issue - happens with programs that seem to have more disk access. Aperture and Entourage are the most notorious culprits, with Safari and Mail.app following suit.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP51.0074.B01
SMC Version (system): 1.33f8

Just an update on my situation. I removed the two WD Caviar green drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored) array as my primary OSX drive. I popped the original drive that came with the machine back in, reinstalled Snow Leopard and over three days in and I've suffered no pauses or beach balls. I'm not sure if the RAID array itself, the variable spin green drives, or some combination thereof was causing the problem, but it seems to be fixed.

So SL doesn't like that configuration. I hope you'll get a chance to submit that to Apple for their Eng. to review.

Just an update...I took my 13" MB Pro to the Genius Bar yesterday and was told my hard drive failed. I'm not sure if it related to my installation of SL or the compputer running hot, but that is the culprit. I will report back once I get a new hard drive to see if I have anymore snowballs after my new hard drive is installed.

Wednesday and no lock ups since the Clean Install and migration of files, folder, and apps from Time Machine. I don't know why people knock TM so much. It's worked for me well for quite sometime. Specially when accidentally deleting files or pulling old files I tossed out awhile back.

I reinstalled Parallels 4.0 and installed XP, and so far everything is stable and very fast. Clean Install vastly improves the responsiveness of SL.

So, this means that the SL upgrade procedure is a TOTAL failure and I have to REDO all the installation activities from scratch?

- first, I have more than 200 apps (with 60% of them I use very often), bought and registered, and I don't feel too much good to redo the job
- second, we don't have to trust anymore the sentences they use (fantastic, easy, painless) when referring to an upgrade... (my upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5 went really better than this crap!)
- third, I'm assuming I cannot restore my machine with TC otherwise it will bring back the stuff that my current SL doubled-installation make feel my MBP17 like an eeePC in terms of performance....

So this means, do we have to trust Apple or is better to "open" a bit before and to "all" the beta test phase of a major release?

So disappointed...

I don't see how TM back will screw you up. If you do a clean install of SL, your TM backup will not replace your System core files that was installed with the Clean Install. It should only replace your files, folder, apps and system settings. Not your core operating system.

If I'm wrong, someone can correct me. But so far, my machine has ran several days straight with no lock ups and the only thing I've added now is what I listed above. All else was a clean install with a TM back up to restore my stuff.

After about 2 weeks of searching, I've found a solution!

I read in another thread of this forum something about "deactivating the time-stamp on NTFS drives".
You have to download Paragon NTFS for Mac: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
Install.
Next you have to open the system preferences of paragon and check "Deactivate Time-stamp" (something like that, I don't know exactly because mine is in german)
Done.

My MacBook haven't had any freezes till Monday!

Philipp

Update:

I checked the box "Disable Last Acccess Time" in the NTFS Pref Pane right after I read your post.

NO beachballs since … What a relief!

Who wouda thunk … Thanks!!!

ken

Hi guys 10.6.2 is out! Anyone testing it ?

Same story here on my early 2008 Macbook Pro. Updated to 10.6.1 and started experiencing excruciating beach ball lockups lasting anywhere from 10-30 seconds. Reinstalled Paragon NTFS snow leopard beta (7.0.2). The beach balls seemed to have stopped. Upgraded back to version 7.0.3. Experienced yet another 30 second lock-up. Went to Paragon's preference pane, clicked "Disable Last Access Time", and so far, have yet to experience a beach ball lockup.

I assume this must probably apply to hard disks with a Windows boot camp partition? I have Windows 7 on the said macbook pro. iMac doesn't exhibit any of these symptoms, but oddly enough, the snow leopard beta version of Paragon NTFS as well as the present version 7.0.3 don't see the iMac's XP partition in the preference pane. Might possibly be a size issue (750GB hd split 400 os x/350 xp)

Unibody Macbook Pro (Mid 2009) has no symptoms, no Paragon NTFS installed.

Mac Mini early 2009 has no symptoms, no Paragon NTFS installed either.

I am. I applied the combo update rather than the software update form the System Preferences Pane. I feel that the Combo Updates tend to be more thorough and less prone to errors. So far so good, no lock ups, beach balls or any weird behavior. Parallels 4 runs fine with XP Pro.