Mid 2010 13" MBP Hard Freezing

[Lurk]

I'm having this frustrating issue and I can't seem to find out what's causing it.

Unibody MacBook Pro, 13" Mid 2010
2.4GHz Core 2 Duo
4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Nvidia GeForce 320M 256MB

This started happening just recently on the latest version of Snow Leopard. I used my Lion USB boot stick to format the hard drive and basically do a full clean install of Lion.

After the fresh install, the problem persisted. It would just hard freeze out of nowhere for no reason. It doesn't matter if windows are open or not. Sometimes it's 10 seconds after getting to the desktop, sometimes 2 minutes, 15 minutes, etc. It just happens. After freezing up, nothing can be done except a hard reset. Everything becomes unresponsive.

I managed to update it to 10.7.3 and the other software updates as well. It still continues to happen.

What could be the cause of this? What are other things I should try to remedy the problem?

I've even tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM - whatever that accomplishes, I'm not sure but I tried that a few times too.

Thanks for the help!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Check the Console for hints.

 

[Lurk]

I let it sit for a bit between crashes so I can isolate the time frame from when the events happened.

The only thing that really stood out from the system log was something about spotlight then (Warning) IndexStore in setAttributes:Items's transaction id 6 is too low for the current index 7. Discarding old 664fb.

A minute after that it crashed and the next message is when I booted it up again 5 minutes later.

 

[alphaod]

From the looks of things, it looks like a hard drive issue. I would boot up in your Recovery and verify your disk via Disk Utility. Have it Repair Permissions and Repair Disk.

 

[thundersteele]

I also think it's the hard disc.

Back up your data!

 

[Lurk]

Thankfully I backed up everything I needed. I actually did a fresh install of Lion (formatted and repartitioned the hard drive to 1 partition). The problem persisted afterwards and that takes me to my initial post here.

I got into recovery mode and performed the Repair Disk function on the hard drive.

The first time I went into recovery mode, it froze up approximately 10 seconds into verifying the disk. I forced reboot and went back into recovery mode and it froze up immediately before I even touched the trackpad or keyboard.

The third time I was able to perform the "Repair Disk" function. I got the green message "The volume appears to be OK." and then "Volume repair complete."

After that finished, I just ran verify disk again and it gave the green "Volume appears to be OK" message.

I haven't had the time to boot it up normally and try it out to see if it worked, but hopefully it took care of the problem. For some reason I have a feeling it didn't, but I'm hoping for the best.

Can a faulty hard drive cause hard freezing like that?

 

[jamojamo]

My wife's iMac had a similar issue. Got it working for a while then back to the problems. Ultimately, even though the SMART status was verified, the disk was failing. We decided it was worth the $ to replace the HD.

Spent a lot of time doing fresh installs etc. and it was sucking up a lot of free time. Been running strong since!

 

[d4rkcell]

your problem is similar to mine...

the wifi card or airport card caused my macbook pro hard freeze...
try to turn off the airport card...

 

[Lurk]

I managed to get the CDs that it shipped with and run Apple Hardware Test.

It failed at "4SNS/1/400000001: TN1D - 1.000" about 2 minutes in.

I did a search and it looks like it's a heat sensor problem. I downloaded smcFanControl and turned it up to the max. It still freezes but it seems like I have a little more time on the desktop before it does. (Placebo effect?)

It's a mid 2010 MacBook Pro so it's already off warranty. How much does a repair cost at the Apple store? Is this something I can maybe do myself?

If yes and I do end up trying my own repairs with no avail, would Apple still repair it if paid for?

Thanks!