MBP - The Spinning Beach Ball Of Death

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Vohligh

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Hi everyone,

A few days ago after returning from holiday, I switched my MBP (early 2012 Lion) on, and noticed that everything was super slow; Beach balling for minutes for simple actions. So I naturally did a hard reboot, only to find it unable to boot. So I tried booting in safe-mode, but it kept on complaining about "flushing of data" in repeat. So I booted up resetting NVPRAM, which took about an hour to boot up; Still everything was super slow.

Next I booted up in the recovery partition, did a disk repair on my boot drive (and partition) which said my drive appears to be ok. I tried fixing up file permissions but cancelled the process after an hour or so (too long). Tried rebooting normally, then I lost the apple logo on boot up (which means the boot disk is not startable). Then I booted up using the Lion install DVD, ran disk utility again, and everything appeared to be ok. Tried to reinstall Lion, but the no disk was available to install on.

Next I booted up resetting NVPRAM, which took an hour to boot up. More beach balling. Managed to launch Activity Monitor, but CPU & Disk Usage seemed normal. Tried to launch System Information, but reported "failed to respond in a timely manner".

I have yet to run an Apple Hardware Test on it. But first I need to backup my data, so I was thinking of removing my drive and putting it in a usb drive enclosure, and backup my data via another MBP.

Anyone have these problems? Any thoughts, suggestions or advice will be appreciated.
 
Backup your data as soon as possible, that HDD is on its way out.

Pull the HDD from the mac and do exactly as you said - use another MBP (or any Mac ) to copy the data off and replace the drive.

A computer slowing down like that and having boot issues - normally I look at the HDD health, first.
 
Resetting the SMC did not work. Did an Apple Hardware Test and it passed without any errors.

Still boots up and runs but takes forever to respond.

I found an excellent guide here to remove the hard drive but I don't have any of those tools - Anyone know where I can get them?
 
Vohligh said:
Resetting the SMC did not work. Did an Apple Hardware Test and it passed without any errors.

Still boots up and runs but takes forever to respond.

I found an excellent guide here to remove the hard drive but I don't have any of those tools - Anyone know where I can get them?
Click to expand...

You can get a torx screwdriver from builders warehouse.

Personally though I'd be tempted to run diskwarrior first and see what it picks up.
 
bwana said:
You can get a torx screwdriver from builders warehouse.

Personally though I'd be tempted to run diskwarrior first and see what it picks up.
Click to expand...

I'm going to try to boot up using TechTool Pro, and see if that can fix anything before I remove the drive.
 
So I booted up using TechTool, ran all the tests - and passed them all.

I even got a thunderbolt cable in the hopes of using Target Disk Mode, to backup my data, but sadly it just refuses to mount (Host: MBP 2011 Snow Leopard, Target: MBP 2012 Lion).
 
Just get the SMART values from the drive and post them here.
 
There might be another issue. Your user permissions are wonky. I saw it on my MBP. There is a fix. (google it, im too lazy). Note, this can't be fixed with the normal disk permissions.

The other option is to reinstall the latest Combo update for Lion. It is a big download, but normally fixes some issues as well.

Also try running OS X in safe mode. Yes, I think it is Apple + S on bootup. Slow, but functional
 
Vohligh said:
I'm going to try to boot up using TechTool Pro, and see if that can fix anything before I remove the drive.
Click to expand...

Not sure techtool does the same thing as disk warrior, and vice versa. Dw has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
 
DW is rock solid and an essential part of my toolkit BUT - it hasn't enjoyed any updates of late and some okes are doubting its integrity with ML.
 
So I installed a copy of Lion on a usb drive, and booted up from it, and mounted my internal hd and ran DW on it. Picked up about 300 errors but couldn't repair it (Disk in use). Next I backed up my data over wifi even though access to the drive was super slow. Then booted up using ML installation disk, and erased my partition (took a while to complete).
 
GreGorGy said:
DW is rock solid and an essential part of my toolkit BUT - it hasn't enjoyed any updates of late and some okes are doubting its integrity with ML.
Click to expand...
It's been updated since ML came out and is apparently even compatible with fusion drive. Do they need to update for the sake of updating? I've used it with ML and personally didn't have any problems.
 
bwana said:
It's been updated since ML came out and is apparently even compatible with fusion drive. Do they need to update for the sake of updating? I've used it with ML and personally didn't have any problems.
Click to expand...

MY understanding is that the most recent update was in 2011 and without 64bit support, struggles with big volume rebuilds. I have come across more than one complaint on some forums - even on MacUpdate - about this.
 
Vohligh said:
So I installed a copy of Lion on a usb drive, and booted up from it, and mounted my internal hd and ran DW on it. Picked up about 300 errors but couldn't repair it (Disk in use). Next I backed up my data over wifi even though access to the drive was super slow. Then booted up using ML installation disk, and erased my partition (took a while to complete).
Click to expand...

Sounds like that disk is faulty.
 
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