iMac freezing after Mountain Lion Upgrade

Here's my update. A couple of restarts fixed the problem of my disc showing wrong info. So that's done.

But I'm still getting these beachball stalls that last from 30 seconds to minutes at a time.

Here's what I've done about it:

1) Completely erased my hard disk and performed a clean install of Mountain Lion. Then reinsatlled my files.

2) Booted into safe mode.

Still no joy.

Here's some things I notice:

A) Sometimes my MacBook won't boot it all. And I have to hold down the power button to restart.

B) Some reboots seem to work better than others and I get fewer and less frequent freezes.

My next step is to dump Mountain Lion and go back to Lion.

I'll keep posting the results.

I'm starting to think it's an iTunes related issue.

I've had iTunes off for most of the day and I've not had a freeze. Anyone else suspect iTunes?

Happens to me when I have only the desktop (during start-up I see screen flickers) loaded. No Aps running at all. Also happened running off booted from repair partition (holding option at start and selecting repair) but not when running booted from internet.

P.S. After booting from an alternate drive with 10.6.8 installed, I have had no trouble with any issues. All programs run and no signs of Flickering or of any freeze-ups. Maybe we just have to wait for 10.8.😕 for the fix to this.

Message was edited by: dlangtry

Similar problems here. After I installed Mountain Lion on my iMac (mid 2007), things started to go horribly wrong:

- Programs like Safari and iTunes don't start anymore, or they load extremely slowly

- Sound starts to stutter, then stops altogether

- Sound can't be controlled anymore on the keyboard

- whole iMac heats up incredibly fast and gets incredibly hot

In my 20 years of using Macs, I have never ever experienced such a mess. I wish I hadn't upgraded to this crap.

My second to most recent macbook pro is freezing after sleeping for more than 15 mins. This starting happening when I installed Mountain Lion, huge regrets installing it now.

@dlangtry. I have the same Mac Pro 2008 Computer and the same problem with random freezing and not being able to quit anything. I noticed the problem on quiting an application most of the time. This seems to cascade to any processing activity like animations, opening new windows or menus, launching or quiting any applications, then everything just gets stuck and I have to manually power off.

Out of curiosity, what is your video card.

My latest problem is crashing before going into sleep. The power light is in sleep mode, but the fans are still spinning.

Yes, I have the same problem: pointer moves, sound continues, everything else frozen. It happens once a day. Power down is the only solution. I would add Mission Control randomly does not work either. I usually have to go to Terminal and type 'killall Dock' to get it going again. Also, I'm getting connection problems with Mail I never had before. Connection Doctor does not fix them. I usually have to restart Mail a few time a day to get it to connect up.

I wish I had not upgraded. I sure hope Apple reads these!!!

Latest issues:

As of last evening, my MacPro will no longer boot up. Either the screen goes black after the spinning thingy or it just freezes at the spinning thingy. Will not even boot my alternate drives with OSX 10.6.8 on it. Will not boot repair partition. I now have a boat anchor. Neighbor has a USB thumb drive with Lion on it that I will try Thursday. will ley you know if I can get back to work or not.

As insanely frustrating as this is, I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one experiencing this issue.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro that I've had strange freezing issues with for some time now, but after I upgraded to Mountain Lion, I started experiencing the same things you all posted about. Screen flickering (from the bottom up), the screen would get all garbled-looking, pieces of windows would be left around the screen when dragging them around... and eventually it would all freeze (except for my cursor), and I'd be forced to restart from the power button. This happened probably about 3-4 times a day right after I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

I ended up taking my computer to the Apple store because of it. The first time, they replaced the logic board. I took it home, formatted my computer and did a fresh install of the OS it came with, and once again, upgraded to Mountain Lion. The next day, it started giving me the same issues as before. So I took it back to the Apple store a second time, where they replaced the entire display. Just got it back last night, and yet again, more screen flickering and freezing. 😠

So in case anyone was worried that it might be a hardware-related issue, it looks like maybe we can rule that out (unless there's something left in my computer that they haven't replaced yet, that we all happened to have problems with at the same time... 😝). Hopefully this is just some kind of a crazy bug in Mountain Lion that Apple has yet to work out.

Until then, if any of you happen to find a solution to this, please share!

A new problem: thinking that the cursor crashing might be related to gestures, I went to settings to turn most of them off. The computer seems to disregard many of the settings. Gestures that work while in settings quit working once I close settings. Some settings seem to persist even though I turned them off. While using Firefox I've noticed the cursor disappear entirely, freeze Firefox, and not coming back until I force quit.

It almost seems like it's getting confused by a persistent old preference setting. I did try repairing preferences, but I think it's time to try again.

I beat the Beachballs!

Does anyone else here have an expanded hard drive installed?

My problem was this: Mountain Lion does not play nice with my expanded 640 GB hard drive. I cloned my drive contents back to the drive that came installed on my MacBook when I bought it. Then re-installed it.

And Poof! No more beachballs.

For more, see this post.

I had thought it was soemthing to do with iTunes playing in the background but it's also happening when iTunes is not running...I would say about once or twice a day on average.

Anyone from Apple looking at this?

Hi all:

Same problem here-- I have 2 imacs. One is an older 20 in mid 2007 model and the other one is a 24 in early 2009 model. The older one has an ATI chipset and the newer one has the Geforce chipset. We just got the newer one upgraded to Mountain Lion. The older one has been a disaster since the day Mountain Lion was released. Point taken it is older-- but my responsive beloved Imac has been a giant bouncing beachball since I upgraded. It is almost unusable-- especially when Iphoto is added to the mix. I tried to repair permissions-- no luck. I just upgraded to 10.8.1-- we will see if it makes a difference.

Here is my list of bugs on this machine since upgrading:

1. Hang on warm reboot.

2. From a cold boot--takes 2-3 minutes to power on.

3. Get permissions errors when plugging in my Iphone and opening Iphoto (newest version)

4. Chrome and Firefox both exhibit bouncing beachball when launching.

5. My time machine is flaking out and often will not finish a backup.

The other Imac-- just freezes when running multiple apps and there is no other choice than to power off and back on. All I did the other night to make it flake out-- I was downloading an app from the app store and I launched Safari. This made the thing flip out.

Lets just say this is the worst update ever. I want my 20 bucks back. If Steve were still around-- heads would roll.

I updated Firefox (also applied OSX 10.8.1 update). When I restarted Firefox a warning came up stating that Microsoft Silverlight has created known instabilities and vulnerabilities in systems, and it automatically turned it off (at least in Firefox).

Since then I've begun turning off plugins in both Firefox and Safari. You have to remove Silverlight manually in Library/Internet Plugins/ and also in Library/receipts/. I might be imagining it, but I think I'm seeing more stability.