Spinning beachball (and pointer) every time I do something in Finder

[MoodyM]

I have a Mac Mini (latest model, only a few months old).

I use it as a Media Centre. It has a few external USB drives connected with all my media.

Every time I try to do something in Finder, every time I double click a folder/drive, I get a spinning beach ball with the mouse pointer still showing (pointing to the middle of the beach ball). It only lasts a few seconds, then everything seems normal.

It seems to happen no matter which drive the said file/folder is on (including the internal HDD).

I've got a SMART utility running (with driver installed so it can see external USB drives) and they all report clean health.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[bobr1952]

Not sure if this will help in your case but anytime I have finder beach balls, I use Activity Monitor to force quit finder--when it restarts itself, all is fine (in my case anyway). This happens to me occasionally after several weeks of running my MacBook without a restart.

 

[MoodyM]

Thanks, will try it, not sure it'll help cos my Mac Mini gets restarted fairly regularly anyway

 

[!!!]

You may need to delete all of the cache, then reinstall.

 

[MoodyM]

You may need to delete all of the cache, then reinstall.

Thanks, how do I do that?

 

[fisherking]

before you get into deleting cached files, or reinstalling the OS:

try running the mini with NO usb drives running. see how that goes.
if it's good, try adding the usb drives in, one at a time. see if anything changes...

perhaps the drives (or one of them), has spun down, and is now spinning up...
then letting you access files.

just a thought...

 

[terryblyth]

When I had this problem on my iMac, it was a faulty hard drive (not that any of the internal tests picked it up). I would make sure you've got backups of everything, just in case.