Disk Utillity Frozen...Won't display disks

[Spikey115]

I've been having some trouble restarting and shutting down my iMac. Whenever i try to do those two things, it just freezes and I have to manually restart it. I went to Disk Utillity to repair permissions but Disk Utility also freezes and fails to display anything. I've included a screenshot. I tried booting with the Mac OS X CD but Disk Utillity freezes there also. What can I Do? Thanks.

 

[mad jew]

That's a bit of a worry. Try running fsck from Single User Mode.

 

[robbieduncan]

Disk Utility seems to do this when it's struggling to gather data about one or more attached disks. This normally occurs due to an issue with that disk. For example I've seen this behaviour with a CD that the machine was struggling (audibly) to read.

What I think happens is that disk utility queries the various buses looking for devices. It finds that a CD (or disk or whatever) is attached so asks for more data. As the device is trying to work this will hang until the CD or disk is mounted. If that never happens disk utility will hang for ever.

In the case of my CD it finally mounted after around 5 minutes. Strangely when I put it in my PPC Mac Mini (instead of my MBP) it mounted straight away.

 

[mad jew]

Yeah, I agree with robbieduncan. Since it acts the same way when booted from the OSX disc, I assumed it's the boot drive that has the problem. Tell us how fsck goes.

 

[Spikey115]

Fixed!

I ran Norton Antivirus on all disks. Went back to Disk Utillity and it worked! I don't know if it was because of Norton. Maybe it just needed some time without me pokin' at it constantly. I'm so paranoid...

 

[robbieduncan]

Wow great.

My advice would be to act on your paranoia as it's probably well founded: back up now!