Macbook White (CD) & hard drive

[Cue]

Hello there,

It seems like it's an I/O problem but I can't be 100% sure. I noticed it under two occasions
1. When I open transmission to start downloading (happens every time)
2. When trying to copy lots of files over USB to the hard drive.

What happens is that I get the famous beach ball (keyboard working, expose) until I try to open a new application, or even right click, run spotlight etc which then causes Mac OS to completely freeze to death. (press power button to shut down)

SMC reset didn't solve anything. Verify disk under Disk Utility shows no problems with the drive.

Thanks in advance for your support :(

[GfulDedFan]

I wonder if perhaps you are lacking memory. How much RAM do you have? How much free HD space?

[Cue]

Well, I have 2Gb of Ram and ~5Gb free of HD.
I don't see how this could be a problem since I have my macbook for over 2 years with this configuration.

[GfulDedFan]

Well, I have 2Gb of Ram and ~5Gb free of HD.

That's not very much free space and my guess is that it may be your problem. You should keep at least 10 to 15% of your drive free for swap space (virtual memory). If your drive is 60GB (original issue), you're at the minimum threshold and if it's bigger, you need more free space.

One solution would be to free up or clean your drive. Another would be to invest in a larger drive.

[01jamcon]

That's not very much free space and my guess is that it may be your problem. You should keep at least 10 to 15% of your drive free for swap space (virtual memory). If your drive is 60GB (original issue), you're at the minimum threshold and if it's bigger, you need more free space.

One solution would be to free up or clean your drive. Another would be to invest in a larger drive.

Yup, sounds like it could be a problem with the low amount of space on your hard drive.

[Cue]

I'll go ahead and try it with more free space since it's dead easy to reproduce.

Though I even had this problem with a little over 10Gb free out of an 80Gb drive.

[pellets007]

"Low" HDD space won't make much if any difference here, especially not with 5GB free. Nothing should be written to the disk because of a lack of memory that takes up that much room. This is also evidenced by the user's last statement. Other factors could affect it, such as amount of application open at the presentation of the SBBoD and their respective processor/memory usages. If you use an external USB powered device, or if anything is in the slot next to the USB port you're using, such as charging an iPod/iPhone or importing data from two USB devices at once.

However, under the circumstances, it sounds more like a software problem.

[Cue]

Which software though?

Considering that it happens in the following cases,

transmission when it generates too much i/o,
files being copied over the usb (ipod)
and finally when having multiple downloads (embedded videos and/or saving links) via safari.

[Cue]

Ok so it happened out of the blue now...
I was just using XCode, no heavy disk I/O usage :(

Still haven't managed to free some space, although i doubt it that Mac OS hangs like that just because I have 5Gb out of 80Gb free :/

These are the last logs from /var/log/system.log
Jun 4 23:38:07 eu Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x3052290, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:38:07 eu Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x3065a10, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:38:10 eu Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x30acfb0, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:38:10 eu Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x30b4e70, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:38:07 eu [0x0-0x1f01f].com.apple.Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x3052290, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:38:07 eu [0x0-0x1f01f].com.apple.Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x3065a10, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:38:10 eu [0x0-0x1f01f].com.apple.Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x30acfb0, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:38:10 eu [0x0-0x1f01f].com.apple.Xcode[240]: Xcode(240,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x30b4e70, has non-zero refcount = 1
Jun 4 23:43:02 eu Evernote[491]: 2 notes to process
Jun 4 23:43:02 eu Evernote[491]: Sync complete.

What worries me the most is that I don't see any errors in software. Could this mean that is a hardware issue after all?

[whitemacbook]

1. When I open transmission to start downloading (happens every time)

What happens is that I get the famous beach ball (keyboard working, expose)

late 08 white macbook 4gm ram C2D 2.1ghz
I had the same problem when opening transmission with lots of torrents and/or large (10GB+) torrents.
I switched to utorrent and it stopped happening.

[Meltdown]

I had similar trouble on my Macbook, with beach ball and system freezes constantly, especially when torrenting or accessing the hard drive. Disk utility said the drive was fine. Did a surface scan with tech tool pro and found some bad blocks. Zeroed the disk, reinstalled osx and used time machine to restore everything and since have had no problems.