Mac Stuck in the past !!

ZENER

Hi all !

I have a C2D 3.06GHz iMac with a "memory" problem. The problem started in January during an iPhone update. Since then the machine is extremely slow to boot - up to 20 minutes at times. Once booted any changes applied prior to shut down are lost. Apps that were removed from the dock reappear as "?" Safari forgets its previous settings and the machine is really slow to do anything.

I've done a permissions check and cleared all the caches and even created a new account but the problem persists. It has Leopard 10.5.8 installed and 4GB of RAM which has been changed with no difference. The hard disk has over 150GB of space left and has been verified as ok.

Anyone have any ideas ?

I'm running Leopard Cache Cleaner at the moment to do some maintenance on the system but am skeptical it'll work.

I'm on the verge of reinstalling but the machine has a lot of applications/settings/document installed which need to be kept and also it won't boot from a Leopard DVD. It will however boot from a genuine SL DVD but some of the apps are incompatible with this version.

HELP !!

Ken

Sad Professor

All round slowness? Sounds like the hard drive is failing. I wouldn't mind what Disk Utility says too much. The last two times I've had a hard drive failure it was telling me everything was a-okay right up until the drive gave up and died.

Did you try booting in safe mode? Installing the 10.5.8 combo update?

Otherwise, I don't think you have any other option but to try a reinstall.

cornbb

I'd concur with Sad Professor. If it is a failing hard drive, start pulling your data off the machine ASAP, starting with the most important.

To confirm, you can start in single user mode - hold cmd-s as soon as you power up the machine. When you get to a prompt, run:

fsck -fy /dev/disk0s2

(If it is a single disk, single partition machine it is likely that your system is on disk0s2).

This will do a more thorough check of your hard drive and attempt to fix any errors it finds. When its done, run

reboot

I had a failing disk that wouldn't allow me to boot the machine recently, and doing this allowed me to at least boot it up and do one last backup before I binned the HDD.

It's also worth getting hold of DiskWarrior, which is one of the best packages for solving such problems.

ZENER

Thanks for the suggestions lads ! I put a new 1TB Hard Disk in and installed Snow Leopard and all is running fine. Was able to find alternatives for incompatible apps (Quark 7.1 for example) so the machine is back running.

Once done I then copied over 280GB of Documents - Fonts - Photos - Stock Art - Music - Emails and other bits and pieces with no problem whatsoever !! No slow down or strange noises from the old drive or failed transfers !

I connected the Drive to the iMacs USB port via an adaptor and booted the machine from it. This meant that I could listen to the drive as it worked. I've listened to failing drives before and there's usually a sound of the head repeatedly reading a sector but not on this occassion !! A surface test claims the drive is ok and at no stage did an application or a file fail to open.

A recurring eror in the logs said something about a missing ";" in the system font - will post the exact error later but it effected any application opened but didn't stop them opening and typing this character in TextEdit or Word or in the spotlight search worked fine !

Anyway I guess ye're probably right to suspect the drive since all else failed and the new drive is performing just fine. Chalk it down to experience I suppose

Thanks again !

Ken