Strange goings on with my MBP

ronnie3585

I posted this in the Apple Devices, but I realise this is probably a more appropritate forum for my question. Apologies to the Mods, feel free to close my old thread.

I have a mid 2009 MBP running Mavericks.

On Saturday while browsing the web it froze solid. After 7 years of owning Macs it was the first time something like this had happened to me. I held down the power button until it knocked off. When I restarted it immediately booted into the Disk Utility, I verified and repaired permissions and restarted. On restart it immediately went to the grey screen, the Apple logo and the spinning gear. The spinning gear stopped and I was left with the grey logo screen, it would go no further.

I tried a boot into Safe Mode and reset the NVRAM/PRAM but to no avail. I then booted back into the Disk Utility and verified the disk. After it ran it said the HD was fine and there were no faults. I did a repair anyway and rebooted, but it was the same as above - grey screen with logo and no further.

Again, back into the Disk Utility and I restored from a backup. Thankfully this worked and the system was fully restored. However, since the restore it's been running quite slow and sluggish. I ran Sophos Anti-Virus and there was nothing detected.

Has anyone had any experience of this? Is my HD on the way out?

Sad Professor

First things first: uninstall Sophos. Track down every file associated with it and delete them.

If it doesn’t resolve the problem or you are unable to locate all the Sophos crap, you’re next step is to do a clean install. If the problems continue, the drive is probably failing regardless of what Disk Utility says.

ronnie3585

Thank you! Will do.

I was led to believe that Sophos was a decent anti-virus/malware?

Sad Professor

Anti-virus software isn’t necessary on the Mac.

Nemeses

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/support/knowledgebase/119182.aspx - This will help in removing Sophos

ronnie3585

Thanks lads. Helpful as always.

Sad Professor

Sad Professor wrote: »

Anti-virus software isn’t necessary on the Mac.

WOW!

OSX is more secure than other OS' but it's becoming a much bigger target than it used to be.

Anti-virus is a good idea.

If you want to be over critical sandbox your web browser and mail client as these are the two most likely sources of malware. This can be done with Vmware, I've included a link below.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1030224

Nemeses

Deleted User wrote: »

WOW!

OSX is more secure than other OS' but it's becoming a much bigger target than it used to be.

Anti-virus is a good idea.

I would tend to disagree.

My opinion: In the world of Windows - It is recommended. In OSX - It is optional.

Some AV's for Mac cause more hassle than its worth. Including the well known branded ones.

Sad Professor

I've been hearing the bigger target thing for years. Almost as long I've been using Macs - over 15 years. When I get my first virus or somebody I know does, I'll start thinking by installing AV. Until then all they are good for is wasting system resources and scanning for Windows viruses. Some of them (Norton etc) are as bad as a virus and can totally hose your system requiring a re-install.

Antivirus is an important part of any defense in depth solution. It most certainly isn't the silver bullet because there isn't one.

I don't know your browsing habits nor do I know your level of expertise so by you saying you've never been infected doesn't mean people don't.
I've run Windows, Linux and Mac for years and never been infected. Does this mean there's no Malware out there for them? No.

I've been using Sophos for I don't know how long and it's never caused an issue, actually it recently managed to detect a hacked site and stopped my browser from opening it. I don't know what the impact would have been for this as the site was taken down very quickly and I patch my system regularly.

Back to the original post - have you uninstalled Sophos? Has this helped?