nuno1959
Level 1
(38 points)
Q: clean, fresh re-install & back to the same problems !?
hi guys
after a spell of LOTS of beach balls & things hanging out of the blue driving me nuts, i decided to re-download M.Lion, make a bootable USB drive, erase Macintosh HD, i verified/repaired the disk w/ D.Utility & proceeded to re-install Mountain Lion + my iLife apps from the original install DVD that came w/ my iMac ( 27'' late 2009, i7, 16GB RAM )
being at a loss pinpointing what was causing the trouble, i ran an Hardware Test ( all good.. ) reset the Pram + SMC...everything short of drowning it w/ WD40 ;-)
it all went smoothly & once done, i checked for software updates & installed them, restarted the computer & started re-installing the non Apple apps i had but NOT before i checked Roaring Apps for any imcompatibilities w/ M.Lion - because of some doubts, a few WERE left out !
it's been a couple of days now, at 1st all was well but slowly the ''clunkiness'' came back :
1 - one minute Safari takes quite a long time to launch, the other it doesn't & just zipps through whatever in a blink of an eye..
2 - same with Mail
3 - i downloaded a couple of bigger videos from YouTube ( 1.something up to 2.5GB..) threw then in the Trash selected Secure Empty Trash as i like doing &....it either empties it in a sec OR ( most likely.. ) it hangs for a LOOOONG time before anything happens
sometimes it goes up to half the progress bar ( or 1/3 or 2/3.. ) & then it just hangs in there - 10, 15, 20 or more minutes
other times it just DOES NOT budge & i'm forced to re-launch the Finder - if i try to Sec. Empty again sometimes it gives me ''...bla, bla can't empty because X, Y, Z is being used, etc..'' yet as far as i can determine NOTHING is using the file i'm trying to get rid of ?..
to make sure everything is OK i repaired permissions w/ D.Utility often, re-start, got a few more large videos ( these seem to be the ones that are REALLY difficult to get rid of.. ) trash them, try emptying the Trash &.....AGAIN the same thing !?
ran a full Onyx ''cycle'' to clean, re-set, re-whatever it is it does & after clicking on empty the Trash i got this message, despite the Trash can being empty :
& this goes on & on & it's getting REAL OLD, REAL FAST !
now, i've looked in the Forum & found a few complaints about difficulties emptying Mountain Lion's Trash but after reading many, it didn't look like they are similar cases to mine hence my posting this..
just out of curiosity, i ''loaded'' the Trash before i started writing this, slected Sec. Empty Trash at exactly 10.51 PM & at 11.37 PM it managed to secure empty about 6.5GB of video files...
before i forget, a message i get a lot when repairing permissions is this :
Group differs on “Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist”; should be 80; group is 0. - this one comes up A LOT MORE than anything else...
the only things i can think of as capable of perhaps ''troubling'' my machineare these :
1 - the Sideffects thingy ( for colored icons on my Finder windows sidebar.. ) found here - http://macmatrix.blogspot.pt/p/sideeffects.html but i tried uninstalling it ( AppZapper, etc.. ) repair permissions, re-start, run computer& nothing changed so i installed it again..
2 - i have set up a Raid1 array w/ D.Utility for Time Machine duty, using 2 Western Digitall My Book USB drives, each w/ 2TB capacity connected via a Logitech powered 4 port Premium USB hub, which were erased, formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), the works...
3 - a couple of FW800 NewerTech Guardian Maximus enclosures connected to my iMac's single FW800 output, each loaded w/ 2 X Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green drives which i have been assured by OWC would work fine ( & did in Lion.. )
one is for my iTunes Library & the other for all my DVD collection
4 - a custom Dock made w/ DragThing, which i also un-installed, tried, everything was the same so i re-installed
among all this upheaval a few things HAVE improved their behavior :
A - iPhoto now launches almost instantly despite i have a few tens of thousands of large size photos in it !? before it took AGES to launch & to shut down & now it's very zippy, even while editing photos
B - same w/ Preview - it used to hang endlessly while doing eidts to multiple images for example, now it doesn't
C - printing & scanning w/ my HP C6180 Photosmart is FLAWLESS - before it could get ''temperamental''
at this point i have been going around so much trying to troubleshoot what/where/how/etc...i've kindda lost my North so to speak
i would be EXTREMELY grateful if anyone would be so kind as to drive me through a process of TRYING to determine WHAT is causing this MOST FRUSTRATING behavior
last but not least i ran a full ClamXav scan of the whole computer + external drives : EVERYTHING was OK
sorry for my VERY long post
2009 27'' iMac i7, 16GB Ram , Mac OS X (10.7), 2 X 1TB + 2 X 2TB W.Digital USB
MadMacs0
Level 5
(4,801 points)
Been quite busy with my day job, but have some time now while watching the news.
nuno1959 wrote:
...as far as your comment on the possibility of my HD going bad, i confess there are MANY other things i WOULD prefer BUT at this point, if i consider ALL THE TIME & FRUSTRATION this weird behaviour has brought into my life, i think i would actually feel relieved if THAT was it - you know what i mean ?
AT LEAST i would know WHY it behaves the way it does - the killer to me is NOT KNOWING nor being able to figure it out....
finally what sort of app do you think would be THE app to use to determine if this is the case ?
There are only two or three that do a good job of checking S.M.A.R.T. status, IMHO. Even though Disk Utility and many others claim to do so, they only check the first level of information and won't see that a hard drive is in declining health.
The first is SMART Utility for Mac with a trial version and it's $25 shareware.
The second is SoftRAID with a thirty day trial and $129. This is the one that predicted my last failure very early in the demo period. Since I don't need any of the RAID features I uninstalled it after replacing the drive. I think they could make good money if they just spun off the health monitoring portion at a lower cost.
The last one that I have recent experience with is TechTool Pro 6 which would set you back $100. They have made some progress with their S.M.A.R.T. testing and it also can do a surface scan. It's what alerted me to my last problem, but wasn't quite enough to convince me that a relatively new drive was going bad, so I installed the SoftRAID demo. Full Disclosure, I am a long time compensated beta tester.
I also use Drive Genius 2 (which recovered a corrupt directory a few years back when nothing else would) but have not yet tried version 3 so I can't comment on whether their S.M.A.R.T. testing has improved or not.
I keep the free version of SMARTReporter running all the time (now 3.99€ at the AppStore, but the free version is still available) which would probably told me eventually that I had a problem, but it might have been too late.
Hope that helps.
