[OT] Looking For OS X Troubleshooting Suggestions

[Jerry Jensen]

I agree with Bob and Stephen. This looks like a failing drive. I just had similar symptoms happen on a server (yikes!) with a failing drive that was external, connected via FireWire. It isn't even necessarily trouble with an internal drive. I'm also a fan of Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich.com). $40 well spent. Cloning to a FW drive and seeing if it runs OK there is a lot less hassle than reinstalling - and then you have a good backup too!
.Jerry

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.