Black MacBook extremely slow after StartUp Disk got full, even though erased

M

MilesNigel

macrumors newbie
Hello,

I'm writing this thread on my dad's netbook bc my MacBook is so slow it took about 3 minutes opening Chrome, 2 minutes to get to MacRumors, forgot my password had to open Word, which I gave up on opening after about 5 minutes of spinning beach ball.

Booting takes about 10 minutes. Finder takes forever. Even moving the mouse over the dock to bring it up makes the computer freeze for at least 30 seconds, if not indefinitely.

The problem started two days ago. I was installing a new Windows XP program via Parallels, and somehow ran out of Startup Disk space. (I've been ripping my DVDs onto an external HD and sometimes I have up to 50+ gb before I get around to transferring to the external.)

When the "Startup Disk Almost Full" warning came up, I immediately erased 20 gb of space and emptied the trash. But everything was still stuck. So I closed out Parallels, rebooted (had to do a hard reboot), waited for the fifteen minute startup, and everything's been painfully slow since.

Activity Monitor says I'm using 1.82 gb RAM of a total 3.0, CPU is 79% idle, when I open Chrome, or anything really, I get the "Not Responding" beach ball, but no % of CPU working on the task, no increase in RAM, nada.

Any ideas? I really appreciate you guys taking the time to read through this whole gripe, but it's so frustrating!

I'd rather not reformat my hard drive, but it is an option. Would that help?

Again, thanks in advance.

Greg

I have the black macbook, 2.16 GHz, 3 GB RAM, latest version of OSX
 
open disk utility...may be faster to boot from your osx install disk...run repair disk permissions...and then run verify disk and if needed repair disk
 
tom vilsack said:
open disk utility...may be faster to boot from your osx install disk...run repair disk permissions...and then run verify disk and if needed repair disk
Click to expand...

Seriously doubt this superstition is going to bring the tiniest bit of improvement. It sounds like you have a bad hard drive. The rest is coincidence. If you boot in verbose mode, I expect you'll see something like this come up a fair number of times:

disk0s3: I/O error


If this is the case, do NOT do what the previous poster said, as you'll risk losing all of your data. Boot from a different drive and get as much as you can off it before replacing it. Software like Tech Tool Pro is capable of telling you if there are bad blocks on the drive. smartmontools provides smartctl, which can show you the actual SMART table on the drive and can have the drive run a self-test. ddrescue is excellent for data recovery.



It is possible that formatting the drive and zeroing all data will make a difference, but the reason is because the drive remaps bad sectors when they are written to. Therefore, if it makes a difference, your drive is arguably bad.
 
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