MBP acting funny, beachballing, sllowwwww

[Bossboss]

My brother's 2009 MBP 13" is having some serious problems. It wouldn't boot (question mark folder), so I popped in a USB with Lion and booted to USB, formatted harddrive, and installed Lion.

Seemed to work fine, although took a while to install.

Then booting to Lion was iffy, most of the time it would boot, but it would take a rather long time (over a minute). Once inside, it would work OK until a random spinning beach ball would come up. Happened a few times in under an hour. Restart and come back to Lion shows some preferences weren't saved.

Thinking it's the harddrive, but I ran a harddrive diagnostic (Disk Utility), and it says it is fine. Now running memtest, but that looks like it will be OK.

What else could be wrong? I need to run a full hardware diagnostic, but holding down D while booting does not do anything. No more warranty so I cant exactly drop it off at the Genius bar.

Thanks!

 

[GGJstudios]

Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Then look to see what may be consuming system resources. Also click on the System Memory tab at the bottom and check to see if your "Page outs" are significant (say 1GB or more).

Performance tips for Mac OS X

 

[S.B.G]

Sounds like the HDD may have some bad sectors. you can bring it in to Apple and seek a replacement, or you can replace it on your own.

If you have access to an IBM PC, you can take the HDD out of the MBP, hook it up to the PC and run the DOS based program Spinrite which can recover and repair bad sectors on a HDD.

I use it all the time and recently ran it on my old MBP HDD as a regular maintenance routine. I've also recovered many Windows BSOD's caused by bad HDD sectors.

 

[Bossboss]

I don't mind replacing the harddrive, I just want to make sure it's the harddrive that is the issue before I go out and buy a new one.

Any idea what software/tests I can download and run to test the hardware?

 

[S.B.G]

I don't mind replacing the harddrive, I just want to make sure it's the harddrive that is the issue before I go out and buy a new one.

Any idea what software/tests I can download and run to test the hardware?

Try this: Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

 

[Bossboss]

Try this: Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

Like I said in my first post, holding D does not do anything when booting. I can't get into the AHT.

 

[GGJstudios]

Like I said in my first post, holding D does not do anything when booting. I can't get into the AHT.

Have you checked the other software-related factors I recommended?

 

[Bossboss]

Have you checked the other software-related factors I recommended?

Yes, so far nothing has spiked the cpu, and no page outs. No beachballs yet, I finished memtest and that worked fine.

Running Xbench to see if there's an issue with a specific component being slower than norm.. Ughh..

 

[Bossboss]

Update:

Ran Xbench on his laptop and saw slow Disk Test results. The only thing I have to compare his laptop to (5400rpm 150gb) is my SSD (Vertex 3), and so the comparison is not fair. I'll post his laptop results here so you can judge.. Maybe something is wrong with his harddrive?

Look at the Random Uncached Read and Write. Is it supposed to be this slow?



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[Bossboss]

Installed SMARTReporter:

SMARTReporter has detected an I/O Error on the drive named ... can indicate a failing drive.

So looks like its either the drive OR a bad cable connecting the drive to the motherboard.

Anyone have this issue before? I've actually taken this laptop into Apple 2 years ago to replace the Sata connector because it went bad.