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*urgent* is my mac about to die!!?

poohat1000

poohat1000

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 11, 2005
271
1
London
right, problems first appeared when i try to open a file in an application, say i want to load a new image in msn as my display picture - when the diologue box opens up and i navigate to the file, it takes literally five minutes to come out of spinning beachball mode. This is a dual 1.8ghz G5 with 10gb free. this concerned me and slowed down my work flow (got around it by dragging images onto app's icon to open em - worked fine). Now more problems have appeared, it literally took me 5 minutes to load this page, http://www.apple.com/support/ - wont even load the images after ten minutes... yet sites such as bbc.com are as fast as ever.

is my hard drive about to die? - this is pretty urgent as i make my living through this computer.

thanks people



edit; i've already done repair/verify permissions and everything was fine.
 
Hard to say -- it is one potential symptom of a dying drive

If you make your living with the machine, you should be running out right NOW and purchasing a new hard drive to back up all your information on.

Heh: What Eric-the-nimble says ^
 
you should use disc utility to verify the disc, not just the permissions repair. If it says failure on exit then your HD either is about to die or the disc image is damaged. either way backup straight away. once you have backed up start the computer from the os install disc by holding c when booting the machine with the disc in the drive. then start up disc utility and repair the disc image of the startup drive. if the HD is going to fail then the failure on exit will reoccur after booting up again on the startup disc.
 
yeah man first thing i did this morning was buy an external HD and i have everything copied ( i think...). Any suggestions on how this might be fixed (if its not a gonner)??? when navigating through the finder everything is still normal, its just the 'open' item from within app's, yet dragging and dropping into app's is fine.... so strange.
 
I'd try cleaning through your files. If you've deleted applications clean out the library folder for corresponding files. For example in you home folder look in the library and application support. I've found that cleaning up old files helps with a lagging hard drive. Do you have applecare? Did you install the techtool deluxe app that came with it. It will check for problems in all your hardware. If you use it make sure you have it do a surface scan. It will check and try to fix an bad parts of you hard drive.
 
Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Illegal name
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking multi-linked files.
,0)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Checking volume information.
block count",0)
(It should be 5653149 instead of 5642488)
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair






****. cant find the ****ing install discs.. will have to have a better look in the morning, anything i can do in the meantime?
 
k i've done everything everyone said, apart from using the boot disc.. try that in the morning... any other suggestions?
 
poohat1000 said:
k i've done everything everyone said, apart from using the boot disc.. try that in the morning... any other suggestions?
Click to expand...

Do you hear a repetative clicking sound coming from the computer every few seconds when the slow-down occurs? Listening for hard drive Click-of-Death is a good way to help tell if it's hard drive failure or not.
 
restarted after cleanup and everything is back to normal :D

however, DU still reporting same errors so im guessing only a matter of time before they all **** up on me again :S
 
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