Major problems after forced shutdown - 10.6.4

[snverhallen]

My iMac froze up so I had to perform a forced shutdown by holding down the power button and now the iMac is running very strangely. It takes like 15 minutes to boot up; it gets to the Apple logo with the spunky cog just fine but it just stays there for a very long time. Then when it does boot it is just insanely slow and the beachballs.

I've already ran repair disk permissions and disk repair via the install disk but to no avail. I've also gone into safe mode.

Please help,

snverhallen

 

[snverhallen]

Just a update.

I managed to clone my internal HD contents to my external HD. Right now I'm running on the external HD.

I believe the internal HD is starting to fail, it's definitely showing the sypmtoms of hard disk failure.

I did however, just in case, repair the internal HD with DiskWarrior just in case there was something wrong software wise on a low level. I'm about to try and boot into it now and I'll report back.

 

[Pili]

I was having some similar issues lately where I thought my boot disk was failing as well. Long boot times and the disk would routinely fail the verify test in disk utility even after a repair. I ended up reinstalling snow leopard (much less of a pain then reinstalling used to be) and then clearing out user and system caches using onyx. Knock on wood but that seems to have done the trick.

 

[msevild]

Hey there. If you have a usable Mac OS I recommend running a program called Smart Utility(ShareWare, definitely worth the money, though) and seeing if you have bad sectors on the drive. The Mac OS X built in disk utility rarely will fail smart status until it is too late. If you have bad sectors, pending, reallocated, whatever the hard drive should be replaced.

 

[snverhallen]

Hey there. If you have a usable Mac OS I recommend running a program called Smart Utility(ShareWare, definitely worth the money, though) and seeing if you have bad sectors on the drive. The Mac OS X built in disk utility rarely will fail smart status until it is too late. If you have bad sectors, pending, reallocated, whatever the hard drive should be replaced.

Thanks so much for the tip! Great app, now I know that the disk is most definitely failing. SMART Utility reports that there are 298 bad sectors. And Disk Utility still reports that the SMART status is OK. I find it pretty poor that Disk Utility doesn't do a thorough check like SMART Utility does.

It also says that it hasn't reallocated any bad sectors which surprises me because that's what it's supposed to do should there be bad sectors on the disk.

Thanks though!