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iMac suddenly slow

B

Bo98

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 23, 2011
80
0
Shetland
(Using a 2010 27" iMac with Quad-Core i5 Processor - Mac OS X 10.6)

Got a new iMac for Christmas! :D But unfortunately, since yesterday, it turned suddenly slow. Last night, when I turned it on seemed to go into Safe Boot (after 1-2 min wait with the white screen with :apple: logo). :confused: Once logged in, it came up with a message saying that my keyboard was low on battery. :confused: I restarted. This time it booted normally but still a lot more slowly. Again I restarted. It took a while to shut down. Finally it started a lot quicker but still slightly slow.

Later that night I used iMovie to import some clips from my Panasonic AVCHD Camcorder. I left it to import. During this time my iMac went to sleep. When I came back (once it was done) I pressed the space bar to 'wake' my mac. It light up with a black screen for about a min before showing the OS with iMovie saying "completed import".

Any idea on how to fix this slowness?
 
Is it possible that your hard drive is almost full?

Also, I would run Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities), select your drive, and click on Verify Disk. Make sure there are no errors.
 
smirk said:
Is it possible that your hard drive is almost full?

Also, I would run Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities), select your drive, and click on Verify Disk. Make sure there are no errors.
Click to expand...

Nope, 790.15 GB free.

Disk seems to be OK (according to Disk Utility).
 
Since it's new, rather than messing around with it trying to figure out what's wrong why don't you take it into an Apple Store and have them check it out?
 
smirk said:
Since it's new, rather than messing around with it trying to figure out what's wrong why don't you take it into an Apple Store and have them check it out?
Click to expand...

Well, I live in Shetland (north of UK) and there's no Apple Stores here. :(
 
Not to hijack your thread, but my iMac has been freezing and is slow. I have plenty of HDD space.

I ran disk utility and it came up with an error, "This disk needs to be repaired. Start up your computer with another disk (such as your Mac OS X installation disc), and then use Disk Utility to repair this disk."

The only disc I can find is my old Snow Leopard upgrade disc... will that work? And if it will, how do I do what disk utility is telling me to do?

Thanks
 
JReynolds said:
Not to hijack your thread, but my iMac has been freezing and is slow. I have plenty of HDD space.

I ran disk utility and it came up with an error, "This disk needs to be repaired. Start up your computer with another disk (such as your Mac OS X installation disc), and then use Disk Utility to repair this disk."

The only disc I can find is my old Snow Leopard upgrade disc... will that work? And if it will, how do I do what disk utility is telling me to do?
Click to expand...

Yes, you should have started a new thread.

I don't have an upgrade disc to check for you, but if it works this is what you'd want to do:

1) Boot up into the install disc by holding down the 'c' key while the computer is powering up (you can let go of the key once the Apple logo appears and it is obvious that the computer is booting off the DVD and not the internal hard drive).

2) Once the Welcome to the Installer screen appears, check the various pulldown menus at the top of the screen; one of them will let you run Disk Utility. Run it.

3) Select your hard drive on the left hand pane of Disk Utility, then click the Repair Disk button. Keep doing this until it says it didn't find anything wrong.

If these steps don't work because you can't boot into the upgrade disc or Disk Utility isn't included on that disc, there is one other thing you could try, which is to boot up under your hard drive like usual but in single-user mode:

1) Hold down the 's' key while the computer boots up; the display will switch to something resembling DOS.

2) When a command prompt appears, type "/sbin/fsck -f" (without the quotes, of course). Repeat until it says it didn't find anything wrong.

Let us know how it goes.
 
smirk said:
Yes, you should have started a new thread.

I don't have an upgrade disc to check for you, but if it works this is what you'd want to do:

1) Boot up into the install disc by holding down the 'c' key while the computer is powering up (you can let go of the key once the Apple logo appears and it is obvious that the computer is booting off the DVD and not the internal hard drive).

2) Once the Welcome to the Installer screen appears, check the various pulldown menus at the top of the screen; one of them will let you run Disk Utility. Run it.

3) Select your hard drive on the left hand pane of Disk Utility, then click the Repair Disk button. Keep doing this until it says it didn't find anything wrong.

If these steps don't work because you can't boot into the upgrade disc or Disk Utility isn't included on that disc, there is one other thing you could try, which is to boot up under your hard drive like usual but in single-user mode:

1) Hold down the 's' key while the computer boots up; the display will switch to something resembling DOS.

2) When a command prompt appears, type "/sbin/fsck -f" (without the quotes, of course). Repeat until it says it didn't find anything wrong.

Let us know how it goes.
Click to expand...

Thanks a million. I'll give this a try and start a new thread with the results. ;)
 
smirk said:
Yes, you should have started a new thread.

I don't have an upgrade disc to check for you, but if it works this is what you'd want to do:

1) Boot up into the install disc by holding down the 'c' key while the computer is powering up (you can let go of the key once the Apple logo appears and it is obvious that the computer is booting off the DVD and not the internal hard drive).

2) Once the Welcome to the Installer screen appears, check the various pulldown menus at the top of the screen; one of them will let you run Disk Utility. Run it.

3) Select your hard drive on the left hand pane of Disk Utility, then click the Repair Disk button. Keep doing this until it says it didn't find anything wrong.

If these steps don't work because you can't boot into the upgrade disc or Disk Utility isn't included on that disc, there is one other thing you could try, which is to boot up under your hard drive like usual but in single-user mode:

1) Hold down the 's' key while the computer boots up; the display will switch to something resembling DOS.

2) When a command prompt appears, type "/sbin/fsck -f" (without the quotes, of course). Repeat until it says it didn't find anything wrong.

Let us know how it goes.
Click to expand...

I held the "s" key while the iMac was booting up and nothing happened. I tried multiple time...

Any suggestions?
 
Alright, I typed in what you said and it started checking all kinds of stuff. At the end it says,

"**The volume Mac HD was repaired successfully.

*****FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED*****"

So am I all good now?

I type exit to start up normal now right?
 
I honestly don't know if you need to reboot first to run it again (maybe someone else can comment on that) but to be safe reboot again into single-user mode and run fsck again. The message you saw means that it fixed something. Keep repeating this until it doesn't show that it found any errors. Then you should be good, at least with those disk errors. There is always the possibility that the disk got messed up which resulted in files getting corrupted. In that case there's no way to un-corrupt them as the damage has already been done (example: the disk thinks that the part of the disk where file A is located is unused, so it stores file B there. You run fsck which removes collisions like those from the disk, but the end result is that file A is gone). If this happens you'll have to reinstall your OS. But hopefully that won't be necessary.

Oh, "exit" will continue booting. "reboot" will reboot the computer.
 
smirk said:
I honestly don't know if you need to reboot first to run it again (maybe someone else can comment on that) but to be safe reboot again into single-user mode and run fsck again. The message you saw means that it fixed something. Keep repeating this until it doesn't show that it found any errors. Then you should be good, at least with those disk errors. There is always the possibility that the disk got messed up which resulted in files getting corrupted. In that case there's no way to un-corrupt them as the damage has already been done (example: the disk thinks that the part of the disk where file A is located is unused, so it stores file B there. You run fsck which removes collisions like those from the disk, but the end result is that file A is gone). If this happens you'll have to reinstall your OS. But hopefully that won't be necessary.

Oh, "exit" will continue booting. "reboot" will reboot the computer.
Click to expand...

So type "reboot" and then hold Command S again and type in fsck... etc until it says everything is good with no errors...
 
smirk said:
Yes, exactly.
Click to expand...

Done and done. Seems to be running a little smoother. Hopefully the freezing issue goes away. In another thread someone told me that my model of iMac has a loose SATA cable issue and that my HD might be failing. Hope that's not the issue.

Thanks for all your help.

right after I submitted the above, the iMac froze again. Guess I'm off to the Apple store because it seems like I have a hardware problem not a software. Damn
 
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