Spinning beach ball of death

[Monochrome]

Hello!

I already posted my problem on Apple discussions but didn't get any answers. So I'll give it a try here.

A week ago my MBP decided to get extremely slow and freeze. I had to turn it off the hard way (power button) and when I started it again it showed me the Apple logo/slashed circle/directory icon with a question mark. After a lot of trying I decided to send my SSD back and get a new one.

In the meantime I still need my laptop so I built the original hard drive back in (OS X was still installed). Now it ran okay, slow-ish like a 3200rpm hard drive runs. After a day or so it began to act up and I decided to do a clean install because I wanted to do that anyways. That took literally 6 hours.

Even after the clean install it's horrible slow. When I type something in non-native OS X applications (Firefox, Twitter,...) it freezes for a few seconds. Even when I click on something in Finder it freezes. It only freezes the application where I type or clicked, so not the whole system.

Oh! Sometimes (!) when I have to restart it shows the slashes circle + Apple logo but starts normally or it boots into recovery mode. Resetting PRAM resolves that but it's still weird.

I googled a lot and tried even more. Here is what I tried so far:

• Made a new user account - worked for 5 minutes
• Double checked if the drive was connected right - it was
• Ran Apple's extended hardware test - no errors
• PRAM reset - did nothing
• SCM reset - did nothing either
• In Disk Utility: check/repair disk - no errors
• Disk Utility: check/repair permissions - repaired some but didn't help at all
• SMART Utility - no errors

Specs (+ some extra information):

• Macbook Pro 13" (mid 2012)
• i7 2.9GHz - average 90% inactive
• 8GB RAM - average 3GB used most of the time
• 750GB hard drive - 22GB used
• OS X 10.8.4
• All updates installed

I might have to say that it doesn't freeze always but more like 90% of the time. It's really confusing and irritating me.

Anybody suggestions?

 

[niteflyr]

Could be a RAM issue. Try swapping positions with the RAM modules to re-seat them and/or try them 1 at a time.

 

[sofianito]

What do you mean by non-native os x applications? AFAIK, FF is a native os x application...

 

[Monochrome]

sofianito: I mean applications that weren't pre-installed with the OS X installation. But apparently that's not right anymore, tried pre-installed software and those also crashed.

Going to try niteflyrs solution tonight. Thanks in advance!

 

[Monochrome]

niteflyrs solution didn't solve my problem.

But... I got my new SSD today. Formatted it, built it in and he didn't recognize it. Then I connected it externally, installed OSX which went all fine. Then I built it in again and it won't work! I get the directory icon with a question mark in it.

I'm clueless and pissed at the same time.

Could it be the cable that connects the hard drive to the motherboard?

 

[nickandre21]

do you have warranty or apple care on your mac? it could be the ram slot/hard drive cable/connector on logic board or something with the logic board.
Do hardware test to see if it gives you any error codes.
The genius bar would be the best place to tell you what the issue is exactly we guys can only assume.

 

[Monochrome]

There are no Apple Stores nor Genius Bars in Belgium but I sent it in for repair. The guy in the shop also thought that it could be the cable.

 

[Monochrome]

After some miscommunication about what they're going to repair they built in a new hard drive and exchanged the cable.
I don't know why they built in a new hard drive even after I told them a million times that the hard drive is fine. Well whatever, they fixed it.