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Pinwheel Loading every ~30 secs. What's goin on?!

B

bingerz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 28, 2008
3
0
Hi...I'm new to the forums. but I've been working on macs for a while now. this has baffled me. Monday, the 26th...my powerbook 1.5 Ghz starting acting up. What i mean by this is, the pinwheel would start spinning for no apparent reason, like roughly 30 seconds or so and i wouldn't be able to do anything. i was only running firefox. i'm used to running 5 or so programs open at the same time with no issues. so i restarted the computer. it was fine yesterday (the 27th)...but it seems as if it's come back again today. i restarted my computer...first got the gray screen...restarted again...got the apple screen...restarted again and everything came up...but it took a real long time to just finish rebooting. now...i double click on anything on my desktop...and it takes forever to open up. i mean...i must've clicked it like 5 minutes ago (at least) and it's still not open yet. the cursor is still a pinwheel. i have my settings so that it shows the seconds on the time...and i usually gauge that if my computer's just frozen. but the time's moving normally. i have my dock on autohide and there are no problems with it. i bring my cursor down..and it pops up as normal and i could shuffle thru em easily. i tried opening an application..but now the dock is frozen and i still have the pinwheel going. i don't know what to do..please help.:confused:
 
anyone? ive restarted it a few times already...but the furthest ive gotten is the blue screen with my cursor. :(
 
Could be a number of things, mainly hardware related. First step: Try starting up on the restore discs and running Disk Utility, or run fsck in Single User Mode (if you know how).
 
last week, i verified permissions....tried to repair it on disk utilities. errored out on repair. found online how you could do it through safe mode or something. did that...fixed it. verified again...no problems.

i tried clean reinstalling it...but i keep on getting the error messages that i need to restart my computer...english/french/german/chinese. with a whole bunch of codes....at the last line "panic: We are hanging here. . . " guess i should do what it says and start panicking now. j/k im done past that. this is just a huge hassle. and i've got deadlines. any more input would greatly be appreciated. thanks for all who've dropped a line.
 
Go out NOW and buy, borrow or rent yourself an external Firewire hard drive
Attach it to the Powerbook
Boot Powerbook from the original OSX CD
Do an OSX install onto the EXTERNAL hard drive
Reboot the machine from the External drive (if you have to, hold down command option shift escape to force it to not boot from the internal drive)
Copy whatever data files you can from the internal drive to the external.

Your internal drive sounds like it is failing, and the more you futz with it, the lower the chance you have of recovering your data. Do not attempt to do any more writing or reinstalling on the internal drive.
 
CanadaRAM said:
That was last week, this is now.

Anyway none of us REALLY know what is going on with the drive, or why.
Click to expand...

I have a suspicion, based on the failure sequence described in post #5. It appears that the drive was fine until he attempted another reinstall. That's when he experienced the kernel panic. This makes me suspect a hardware failure of another sort.
 
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