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MacBook 2,1 Running Ungodly Slow

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Puffin415

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 26, 2010
8
0
I'm sorry to be one of those people, but I'm desperate here.
So, my 3 year old MacBook, before I did a full wipe and reinstall of 10.6, was having problems playing even simple youtube videos. I figured out that the processor was getting to hot for some reason and just wouldn't cool down playing Flash 10.1. I then tried to make a dual boot Ubuntu 10.04 to see if a different OS had the same problem. Well, I ended up screwing it up and my MacBook out of 10 gigs and I just said enough and did a fresh reinstall. Things have been great up until today.
My MacBook just too 10 minutes to go from clicking my user icon to entering the password. This morning it was very slow, and I shut down and restarted quite a few times with no result. I tried a hardware diagnosis but it wouldn't boot into the CD at startup. Please help.
 
^ Is 3 years old really that old that it would be winding down? 1 gig of DDR2 I believe.

Yes, I followed them exactly, and when I pressed D it wouldn't go to the hardware test.
 
Hard drives fail at anytime. Sometimes its a sudden death, other times, its a slow death. Some hard drives last for years, other last for days. I had a 15 year old DOS computer for about a year. Its hard drive was the Original one. It was a 15 year old HD still running strong. I threw it out, as I didn't need or want it though, and 3GB is kinda small for me.:p
I would also suggest upgrading the RAM to at least 2GB. 4GB if you can afford it and if the computer can accept that much. 1GB is just enough for SL.
 
I finally got it up and and currently repairing permissions. It's giving me a lot of Open error 5 messages, is this normal?
 
Puffin415 said:
I finally got it up and and currently repairing permissions. It's giving me a lot of Open error 5 messages, is this normal?
Click to expand...


I don't know what an Open error 5 is. Maybe it has to do with the Open firmware, or is Open firmware for Power PC machines?
I'm not much of a help.:( I just was guessing you hard drive was on its way out, and it maybe is.
 
It's actually my second hard drive, a year after I had it the original one died and I had to get a new one. It's a Toshiba MK8 something
 
There are now hundreds of messages on the Permissions Repair status screen saying: Open error 5. What's wrong now?
 
I tried a disk repair and got an error saying I need to reformat my drive. Does this mean the hard drive itself is dying, or did something happen during the installation?
 
Puffin415 said:
I tried a disk repair and got an error saying I need to reformat my drive. Does this mean the hard drive itself is dying, or did something happen during the installation?
Click to expand...

Download SMART Utility.app and see what it says for errors and for bad sectors.

Note: don't tell us that Disk Utility says the smart status in OK, since that is a pointless measurement and rarely reports didly wrong.
 
Definitely sounds like a bad HDD. I would set up an appointment at the genius store, you may get lucky and have it replaced.
 
Onyx's SMART checker didn't find anything wrong, but it did say the same as the Disk Utility in that there is at least something wrong with my OS X partition, but after all the errors found during a permissions repair not a week after completely restoring it, I'm going to conclude that the hard drive is simply toast. OS X won't even boot up anymore, just gives me the Apple gray screen and a bar that won't move. Second one in 3 years on one computer... I would bring it to an Apple store but my warranty ran out just 3 months ago, and I've already ordered a new computer for college (you guys will be saddened to hear I'm switching to an Asus), but I've had nothing but problems with this machine and Apple is just not updating their computers to the standards to which I require.
Thank you everyone for your help and suggestions!
 
Download Smart Utility.app or use a complete smart status tool.

If it doesn't read errors and bad sectors, try again with SMART Utility.

Also TechTool Pro has one but it costs money.

If you don't know where try...

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/32454

If Onyx only reports pass, you FAIL.

Also running Techtool from Apple care will report bad sectors, but if you simply erase and install. Won't do didly, the problem is still there -- which is why you are looking for errors (and the actual type of errors reported by the drive) and bad sectors (which can only be fixed by zeroing the drive, but mean it is failing anyhow).

NOTE: for those too lazy to download a real program to test smart, when the drive returns a cannot repair in single user the "Cannot Repair Due to this Error (4, 69)" the 69 tends to be the total number of drive errors over the life of the drive. Anything in 4 digits is bad, and 3 digits on way to bad.
 
I zeroed out the hard drive on the reinstall of 10.6, and still had issues reported.
My MacBook won't even boot up anymore, so I can't try out any tools.
The number of errors was well in the thousands, but don't remember the exact number. I'm just going to buy a new hard drive and some new RAM and see if that works.
 
Puffin415 said:
The number of errors was well in the thousands, but don't remember the exact number. I'm just going to buy a new hard drive and some new RAM and see if that works.
Click to expand...

Then it is dead, mine only had 6k errors when Apple replaced it. Went from 500 to 6k in 4 weeks. But at least the free catalog rebuilding methods using fsck worked, and I didn't need to pay for Disk Warrior.

But it is sad to say that the generic SMART checks never tell you it is dying, have to actually look at the lifetime stats inside the drive using a SMART diagnostic app to see what is up.
 
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