SLOW booting problems...

[mleitch2949]

Hello all,

I am running a black 2007 Macbook with Mac OSX 10.6.3.

My symptoms are:

Lots of spinning wheel time. Especially in Safari (I know, I know...) but also when performing basic operations in the Finder. The wheel can spin for up to 30 seconds...

Slow booting. When I restart I get the spinning wheel and grey progress bar for about 10 minutes.

Broken iTunes. I get a message to the (i)tune of "You cannot access the application iTunes because it is damaged..."

--

I have mucked about with my preference files, and in the end just blasted them and inserted old ones from Time Machine (in both top level and my user account). I set up a spare account and it seems to work fairly well (even in Safari) but the boot problem remains. I also fixed iTunes using Time Machine, but I am unsure as to the original cause of the issues.

Any ideas as to the source of my problems would be very helpful!

Many thanks,

M

 

[flopticalcube]

See the Mac won't boot? link in my sig. You probably need to repair your HD via Disk Utility. You could also try reseatting your hard drive. It may have come loose.

 

[mleitch2949]

Thanks for the resource, I'm working through the list as I type. I tried reseating the HD and the startup is still slow; the progress indicator is at approximately 30% at the moment...

Call me ignorant, but I can't remember seeing this progress indicator at bootup before. Is that because booting is usually so fast that you don't see it, or is it caused by a change under the hood, or was I just not paying attention before?