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iMac freezes for a minute

Q

quintendehaas

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 21, 2011
18
0
Hello,
I own a late 2009 27" iMac and it has been serving me great for years but now it's showing some issues: while doing ordinary (non-heavy) work it freezes for about 30 seconds. It shows the spinning wheel and I can click around applications but I can't do anything with these applications. After a little while it just continues to work just fine. This happens every other hour.

Are these early signs of a harddrive failure or would a clean Lion-install help me? Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Quinten
 
Does it occur whilst time machine is backing up or accessing particular folders/files?

I have this issue on my Mac Pro, I had a HD problem not long back and I fear I may have inherited some corrupted files from the backup of that dying HD. When I tried to load up the folder with these files in (they were mostly images) my Mac would do the same as your but eventually recover.

Not sure if this means bad sectors or failing HD if it occurs every hour.
 
It might also be helpful to look in the Console app once your Mac is usable again, and see if anything strange appears there during the 'hanging' period.
 
thejadedmonkey said:
Thisjust started happening on my dad's imac, and a quick "repair permissions" seemed to fix the issue. Give that a shot.
Click to expand...

Thank you, it's now repairing, I found about 30 errors!

I hope that's it, I'll keep you guys posted.

Thanks for your help, all of you!

Regards,
Quinten
 
I have a similar issue where my 2010 27" iMac 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel i7, 32GB RAM, 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 3G, 1TB WD Caviar Black hangs on iTunes or Microsoft Office 2011 RDP client after returning from sleep. Safari is fine. Neither app "beach ball" they just bounce for about 30-45 seconds. It happens very often returning from sleep, but never after a restart. Sometimes this will stop other apps from launching. Once the 30-45 seconds have passed everything launches lightening fast. I've actually did this for all my applications at once. If I use my computer for a while after returning from sleep with other applications, I can return to iTunes or RDP without a problem. I thought it might be disk access problems, but I can immediately dig through random folders after waking without hanging. I did a repair disk and repair permissions, PRAM reset, SMC reset and no change.
 
quintendehaas said:
Thank you, it's now repairing, I found about 30 errors!

I hope that's it, I'll keep you guys posted.

Thanks for your help, all of you!

Regards,
Quinten
Click to expand...

Too bad, still no luck. I'll try the console thing, I'll copy some of the errors in my next post. Pretty annoying you have to wait for a little while to figure out if my efforts have been successful ;)
 
I deleted my plist files in Library > Preferences > System Configuration with the exception of the preference.plist which holds OSX user configurations. All these files can be deleted and upon restart will be recreated with OSX defaults. This seems to fix my issues. I also had slow file copy as well, which is how I came across this solution.

Alternatively, you could create a new account to see if it fixes your problem. If so, then the above suggested should work.
 
I thought my problems were solved. However, the issue continues with iTunes, and Microsoft RDP. Safari does not behave like this and the HDD is accessible immediately after wake. I also do not hear clicking noise from the HDD. The confusing part is the app bounces in the dock for 30-45 seconds then loads fine, no beach balling etc.
 
I replaced my com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist with a known working one from OSX, turned off home sharing and Genius, and deleted the Genius db files. This fixed my problems with iTunes freezes after waking from sleep. I also repaired some questionnable network settings on my Airport(s) and TimeCapsule. We'll see if this fixes the rest of the issues with apps freezing for 30 seconds with no beach balling.

I've been following my console app on a known good working OSX machine and comparing to the iMac during various tasks. I'm still getting one error with the com.apple.mDNSResponder Error Index about 24 times in a row when launching iTunes.
 
Last edited:
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