Besides HDD what could make my macbook unresponsive

[antdawe]

I have a mid 2009 macbook pro

2.26ghz
2gb Ram
160gb hdd

Was browsing the web the other night then all of a sudden it became unresponsive. No applications open and the spinning beach ball for several minutes. once it stops if i click on finder or spotlight etc it will take another several minutes. This pee'd me off soo much I inserted the mac disc and formatted the hard drive and reinstalled os x.

Strangely the install took forever and once it finally finished the mac is still in the same situation as above.

I have checked the smart status of the drive and that is fine.
My RAM is registering with the system.

Before I go out and buy a new HDD is there anything else it could be because I can't think of anything.

oh and also I took my hard drive out and hooked it up to my iMac through USB to do a fresh install of Lion through that but I couldn't figure a way to do it.

Any advice would be a great help thanks

 

[nebo1ss]

I assume you still have the OS on the disk you took out. In that case put it in a USB case, connect it as an external drive then just go to System preferences select it as the start up disk and reboot the mac. It will boot from the USB drive and you can then do the upgrade to Lion on the external disc.

 

[antdawe]

its through usb mind not firewire should it still work ok?

 

[nebo1ss]

Does not matter either will work. The response will not be the same as an internal drive but it will work fine.

 

[antdawe]

ok so I just plugged it in turn my iMac off then on, held down the option key and selected the usb hard drive and thats all I had was the grey screen with the apple logo. I didn't even have the spinning icon underneath.

 

[mrs1986]

ok so I just plugged it in turn my iMac off then on, held down the option key and selected the usb hard drive and thats all I had was the grey screen with the apple logo. I didn't even have the spinning icon underneath.

I guess it wont turn on because it was installed in another mac, so hardware is diferent, and because of that it wont turn on... put it as an external hard drive in the imac, clear it out, and then do that againg but trying to install the OS you were going to install....

 

[antdawe]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Is there anything else it could be other than hdd?

 

[iamBATMAN]

Restart your Macbook Pro and hold Command + S

Your Macbook Pro should load into a command line interface (white text on a black background). Once it loads everything and you're able to perform commands, type:

/sbin/fsck -fy

Allow it to run the check and if it has any errors type them on this thread.

If it does not give any errors, let me know.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Is there anything else it could be other than hdd?

Yes. The two likely causes of the issue, if not the HD, are your HD cable or RAM.

 

[antdawe]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Ok so I run the test like what was recommended and it kept saying timed out. So I've backed up my ps3 to my iMac, wiped my ps3 60gb hdd and put that in my MacBook. I can confirm that it was the hard drive that was failing.

My issue is mind I know it's out of warranty but 19 months of normal everyday use tales the p**s for a hdd to last. Is it worth kicking up a fuss with apple?

Thanks all for your excellent help by the way. Really appreciate these forums