G5 tower got really slow and laggy

nyutnyut · Jul 8, 2008

my computer crashed yesterday, and when i reboot, it took forever to restart, then crashed a couple more times. i tried a disk repair from the install CD disk utilities, but after an hour or so, it said disk coudln't repair (i think it repaired things like the B-tree and directories)

now it takes 10mins+ to boot, and apps that used to launch right away, take a long time. there's a lag as i type this in now.

it's a dual 2ghz PowerPC G5, 3gigs of ram, running on tiger 10.4.11.

anyone have any similar problems? any ideas? would upgrading to leopard help?

matt321 · Jul 8, 2008

It sounds like your hard drive is about to fail. I would backup everything ASAP. You could open Disk Utility, click on the hard drive, and check the S.M.A.R.T. status. My guess is it says it's failing.... You might also try only having 1 stick of RAM to see if it is the culprit.

As for leopard, upgrading won't solve your problem if it is a hardware failure. I would wait until you figured out what the culprit is.

Sun Baked · Jul 8, 2008

The drive catalog/file structure is messed up.

Pulling that drive while you load the OS onto another drive will likely allow you to run the OS off a clean drive.

Then you can try a drive repair utility on the old drive, or simply just saving stuff off the other drive -- if you think it may be failing.

---

Using the current drive without repair will likely give you a flashing ? mark soon.

Drive is either on the way out, or the damaged file structure is bad enough to cause severe issues. Or both.

NOTE: pulling it while you work on a OS installation on a new drive just keeps the time off the old drive on its countdown to death if you think it is failing. You have a tower, which makes this easy to do. Just remember to MANUALLY set the new drive as the startup drive before putting the old one back in.

nyutnyut · Jul 8, 2008

Sun Baked said:
The drive catalog/file structure is messed up.

Pulling that drive while you load the OS onto another drive will likely allow you to run the OS off a clean drive.

Then you can try a drive repair utility on the old drive, or simply just saving stuff off the other drive -- if you think it may be failing.

---

Using the current drive without repair will likely give you a flashing ? mark soon.

Drive is either on the way out, or the damaged file structure is bad enough to cause severe issues. Or both.

NOTE: pulling it while you work on a OS installation on a new drive just keeps the time off the old drive on its countdown to death if you think it is failing. You have a tower, which makes this easy to do. Just remember to MANUALLY set the new drive as the startup drive before putting the old one back in.

wow, you just said a bunch of stuff that i have no clue how to do.

i'll probably install a new harddrive if this one is failing. how do you manually set teh new drive as teh startup drive?

isn't there a site that has video on how to do this stuff?

i'm currently backing everything up onto external harddrives.

thank you for your help so quickly guys.

nyutnyut · Jul 8, 2008

matt321 said:
It sounds like your hard drive is about to fail. I would backup everything ASAP. You could open Disk Utility, click on the hard drive, and check the S.M.A.R.T. status. My guess is it says it's failing.... You might also try only having 1 stick of RAM to see if it is the culprit.

As for leopard, upgrading won't solve your problem if it is a hardware failure. I would wait until you figured out what the culprit is.

the S.M.A.R.T. status shows as verified. is there another way to see if the drive is failing?

G5power · Jul 8, 2008

Fortunately internal hard drives are fairly reasonable in price.

I would encourage you to install new hard drive and boot from your OS X DVD and do a new install. Be sure and select your new hard drive for the install.

Then once you are through with the install you can easily transfer over your data files from your previous hard drive. Once you have everything removed you could re-format your old drive and use it as a second drive.

However you need to be cautious of relying on a drive that is exhibiting signs of having serious issues.

Sun Baked · Jul 8, 2008

After you are done just use...

:apple:

> System Preferences > Startup Disk

---

Just pull the messed up drive while you are working with the new one ... and remember to set the above before putting it back in.

Edit: (for PPCs) trust me the selected startup drive is part of the boot sequence even before the keyboard is checked to start from CD, if the file system gets really bad on the startup disk it can lock the machine up. Only way around this quickly on a tower is pull the bad startup drive, select new boot drive, and then the machine won't crash on reboot and you can actually put the bad drive back in to work on it.

nyutnyut · Jul 8, 2008

G5power said:
Fortunately internal hard drives are fairly reasonable in price.

I would encourage you to install new hard drive and boot from your OS X DVD and do a new install. Be sure and select your new hard drive for the install.

Then once you are through with the install you can easily transfer over your data files from your previous hard drive. Once you have everything removed you could re-format your old drive and use it as a second drive.

However you need to be cautious of relying on a drive that is exhibiting signs of having serious issues.

thanks, i would only want to use the old drive to pull stuff off of.

nyutnyut · Jul 8, 2008

if my old harddrive is still working, is there a way to recreate it with all the preferences on the new startup disk drive?

would i have to use something like carbon copy cloner, or can i just copy certain library and preference files for my email and web bookmarks?

disconap · Jul 8, 2008

If the file structure is bad DO NOT USE CARBON COPY CLONER. It clones drives on a block by block basis (I have it running right now, actually), and it will copy the structure problem to the new drive. If it's a mechanical problem to begin with, then you should be able to fix the structure with Disk Warrior, but still, why create more problems?

I suggest doing a clean OSX install on a new drive, then choose to shut down when it says it will restart (do a hard restart if you need, hold down the power button until you hear the drive spin down/roughly 5-10 seconds), reconnect the drive (no need to pull it entirely, just disconnect the SATA and power cables before you start the install and reconnect them at this stage) before booting into the new drive, and during the registration pages just import your account from the old drive. Provided there is no corruption at the user folder level, you should be able to get all your settings and apps and everything onto the new drive without a problem. Then just run disk utility, repair disk permissions, and you're ready to start running software update (ALWAYS run disk utility after each update; run software update, restart, run disk utility, repeat, until you're done). I did that earlier today on a G4, only took about half an hour.

Good luck!

EDIT: just saw your last post. Follow the instructions above and you should get exactly what you're asking for. But as another user said, back up your essential files ASAP, burn them to DVD or copy to an external drive or something, you don't want to lose anything irreplaceable. It would suck to lose your itunes library or web browsing settings, but not nearly as much as your financial records or family photos and the like...

nyutnyut · Jul 9, 2008

so i tried to rebuild everything and have everythign copied over when i reinstalled the OS on the new harddrive and relaunched. it didn't work. none of my settings are the same.

is there any way to do this manually?

disconap · Jul 9, 2008

I'm sure there is, but I only know of Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a bad idea if your tree structure is invalid. You could always try it, though...

matt321 · Jul 9, 2008

What settings aren't the same? Is all the data still there?

I was going to say use Migration Assistant, so that it will copy of the .plist files for you. You can manually copy over .plist files but that is very risky and could have caused the problem in the first place. They are located in <user folder>/Library/Preferences

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