[OT] Looking For OS X Troubleshooting Suggestions

[-=>JB<=-]

About a year ago the hard drive on my mac mini failed.  I would be using the
computer and all of a sudden things would slow down for a little bit and then
run normal again.  I can't remember if there was a beachball showing but it
might have been.

You should back up your drive now if you haven't already done so.  I found
a Mac Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex external usb drive on ebay pretty cheap
and have my OS X running from it without any problems.  You can get one
with 500 GB on ebay for around $40-$65.

As others have said back up your info.

-=>JB<=-


On Sep 13, 2012, at 8:52 AM, Bob Sneidar wrote:

> Scott, your hard drive is failing. What happens is, when the OS detects a bad block or sector on the hard drive, there are routines in place to attempt to move the data to another location. This is a very high priority system event, even higher than mouse clicks. You will not be able to interact with anything while this is going on. 
> 
> It is recurring because the attempt has failed. You need to back up what you can, I recommend a great utility called Chronosync which has a feature to ignore errors, and then replace the drive. Carbon Copy Cloner is also a good choice even though it is paid software, because it will make a full bootable backup to another drive, and can make scheduled new and changed backups with old file archiving. 
> 
> Bob
> 
> 
> On Sep 12, 2012, at 9:02 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:
> 
>> Hi List:
>> 
>> Apologies for posting something other than a EULA opinion, but I'm wondering
>> if someone might have some experience with an OS X system that is throwing
>> random beachballs all over the place (10.6.8).  Scroll a list of files in
>> the Finder = beachball; launch an application = beachball; create a new
>> email message = beachball.  I've used Disk Utility to repair the disk and
>> permissions (nothing major appeared to be found).  I've run a test on RAM
>> using MemTest, with apparently no problems found.  I've been watching
>> Activity Monitor to see if there's anything sucking up processor use --
>> nothing appears to be out of the ordinary (that I know of).  I'm now trying
>> an app called Onyx to see if it will find anything worth addressing.
>> 
>> Short of reinstalling the system (days worth of labor), I'm at a loss for
>> what else to try.  The one thing I found online is that the Spotlight
>> indexing process can sometimes go crazy and intermittently bog down the
>> processor -- Onyx supposedly allows you to disable this but I'm not certain
>> this is the problem (not a regular culprit in Activity Monitor).
>> 
>> Not sure if this means anything but apparently I can't reset PRAM on the
>> system (Intel Mac Mini).  I've tried several times with multiple keyboards,
>> without success.  I believe with Lion and above maybe this is supposed to be
>> unnecessary, but it's supposed to work with Snow Leopard and earlier, yes?
>> 
>> Anybody have any ideas for something else to look for?  I know some of you
>> do more low level tinkering than I.  Restarts help for a while, but I can
>> only restart the system so many times...
>> 
>> Thanks for any suggestions.
>> 
>> Best Regards,
>> 
>> Scott Rossi
>> Creative Director
>> Tactile Media, UX Design
>> 
>> 
>> 
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