Guess my Macbook HD is dying?

[Revlefty]

It's been getting slower and slower but it finially locked up on me yesterday and it's in pretty bad shape now. It's at a total crawl, simple things like moving between folders locks it up for a minute or two and things like Quicktime and iTunes won't even open. But for some reason programs like Applejack say there is nothing wrong with the computer.

Should I just go ahead and replace the HD, or are they're any options?

[Skeletal-dæmon]

Hmm. In Activity Monitor (if you can open it), what is a quick average reading on the Disk Activity tab?

[iBookG4user]

Have you tried creating another user account and see if that speeds it up? If that doesn't work try an archive and install, if the archive and install doesn't speed it up then I'd look into replacing the hard drive.

[Revlefty]

Hmm. In Activity Monitor (if you can open it), what is a quick average reading on the Disk Activity tab?

It does open, what info are you looking for in Disk activity?

[Skeletal-dæmon]

Total reads in/out, and Data written/read per second.

That'll tell us if your disk is constantly toiling away at something, or if the slow down itself is physical.

[Revlefty]

Total reads in/out, and Data written/read per second.

That'll tell us if your disk is constantly toiling away at something, or if the slow down itself is physical.



Read in: 393008
writes out: 95754

The Data red/written/sec are at 0

[entplex]

Take a look at the system log, this is accessible from the application called "console" post the last weeks worth of the system.log and I'll tell you what I see. Also, get your data off the machine in case it's dying. There were a bunch of MacBooks with bad hard drives, take a look at this http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=393117 . Good luck.

[Skeletal-dæmon]

Wow... my computer has been on three days straight and I've been using it quite a bit and your Reads In is almost four times higher than mine. Are there any large tasks in the background that could be writing anything to the disk, or any programs crashing and dumping their data?

And yeah I agree... start a backup just in case.

[Revlefty]

Wow... my computer has been on three days straight and I've been using it quite a bit and your Reads In is almost four times higher than mine. Are there any large tasks in the background that could be writing anything to the disk, or any programs crashing and dumping their data?

And yeah I agree... start a backup just in case.

I don't do much on the thing, Adium seems to be taking up the most memory at just under 50MB, should I be looking at the Virtual memory because it looks like most of the programs running are over 300MB.


I'm currently moving my data to another computer just in case it goes.

[Skeletal-dæmon]

I don't think virtual memory would cause that big a Read In figure. It looks like something somewhere is constantly writing data to the disk. I have to head off to university now, but I'll check back at lunch and see how things have checked out. Good luck transferring your files!

[Revlefty]

Take a look at the system log, this is accessible from the application called "console" post the last weeks worth of the system.log and I'll tell you what I see. Also, get your data off the machine in case it's dying. There were a bunch of MacBooks with bad hard drives, take a look at this http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=393117 . Good luck.

My drive is Fujitsu so I guess that isn't the problem.

I looked in the console and the entire thing either says that somethings crashed and about 100 of these error messages:

CRITICAL **: purple_presence_get_status: assertion 'presence != NULL ' failed

[applephysci]

My drive is Fujitsu so I guess that isn't the problem.

I looked in the console and the entire thing either says that somethings crashed and about 100 of these error messages:

CRITICAL **: purple_presence_get_status: assertion 'presence != NULL ' failed

Given your earlier symptoms and this critical error, one differential diagnosis: an Adium issue. Try entirely force-quitting Adium process, and see if it resolves..

[Revlefty]

Given your earlier symptoms and this critical error, one differential diagnosis: an Adium issue. Try entirely force-quitting Adium process, and see if it resolves..

I force-quit Adium about 30minutes ago and it didnt seem to help, hell the readin/out are continuing to climb.

Any Idea if this is the HD going or not? I was going to pick up a new drive after work tomorrow and would rather not spend the money if it's not needed.

[NJuul]

How much disk space & how much free disk space do you have?
How much memory & how much free memory do you have?
How much CPU is being used?
How long has your mac been up without a re-boot?
Have you tried verifying your disk with Disk Utility?
And, though it is unlikely to do anything, repair disk permissions (disk utility).

[Revlefty]

Ok so I did some maintenance with the Disk Utility and did an archive and install and the Macbook is working much better but it's still not right. I've only come across 2 problems so far, first being that iTune won't open at all and second one is I can't get into my Music folder, everytime I do the computer freezes up for a little. But, the music is there and playable with other programs if I do a search and get to it that way.

So i'm a little lost on what to do next, should I just wipe the whole computer clean and do a fresh install or will that not help?

[bizzle]

The easiest way to check for a failing hard drive is to use SMART Utility.

http://www.volitans-software.com/products.php <-- free trial