Hi Everyone..... God i hope you can help. I have a Mac Pro purchased june two years ago. Recently it has begun intermittently running Very very slow. Soooooo slow. I am forced to hold the power button to shut down.
I repeiared disc permissions which seems to help but still it randomly runs so slow and can consume half a day trying to speed it up again?? Any ideas?
PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5), final cut studio
Did you try Resetting SMC as well as NVRAM?
you know how you need to have another boot device to Repair disk drive?
That a Mac Pro and PowerMac are mutually exclusive.
If you don't have Lion or later then you don't have built in recovery partition but you can use DVD or create an emergency boot volume (30GB) and clone your system.
There isn't enough to give a quick fix other than Safe Boot.
You probably need to move t he system to another drive and assume the one you use is corrupt directory and bad sectors
And what you have installed and running or corrupt files.
General purpose Mac troubleshooting guide:
Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393
What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X) - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564
Creating a temporary user to isolate user-specific problems:
Isolating an issue by using another user account
Identifying resource hogs and other tips:
Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used
Starting the computer in "safe mode":
Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?
To identify potential hardware problems:
General Mac maintenance:
If this started happening without your having made any changes and without a warning of low disk space, then it's likely that the boot drive, or some other hardware component, is failing. Back up all data immediately, then run the Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostics.
Even if the test is negative, you should make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store to have the machine tested more thoroughly.
Thanks... Linc Davis, I am currently copying my internal macintosh HD to my internal Macintosh HD-2 and then will tell my mac pro to use this as default boot drive.
I'm hoping this should solve the problem.
If this works then shall I just physically remove the failing drive from my mac?
This systen is two years old and cost me a small fortune so im gutted that a drive has potentially gone already!!
My gut instinct was the drive too but I dismissed that because of its age.
I love my mac and feel like my right arm has been chopped off when it doesnt work.
Ill let you know how i get on and thanks for your post.
I don't know for sure that the drive is failing. You may (or may not) be able to determine that as follows.
If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CSeq "I/O error" | tail | open -f -a TextEdit
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. Normally the window will be empty. If you get output like this:
kernel[0] <Debug>: disk0s2: I/O error
the boot drive is failing, or there's some other hardware fault in the storage subsystem.
Thanks Linc and although that info is still usefull incase.... I have changed over the boot drive and the system since has been flying so I am going to work away and pray it stays that way. I will save everything to my externals and I still have the potentially failing drive in the machine but eject this when i boot up and have set the default boot drive to my other internal drive. If the problem comes back then i will re-instate the suspect drive if need be as it has all my booting up stuff on there so i have a back up.
If it starts again then i will know its something other than the drive and have to look further. I did run an apple hardware test from the install disc 2 and it ran for just over an hour, i heard the different components inside individually wurring away and it came back with the result that everything was fine.... I do realise that this would struggle to pick up an intermittent fault though.
Thanks for your help.
power mac pro slow
