Everything freezing suddenly. beachball. random. for no reason at all

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Hi,

I've been a mac user for couple years now. never had any troubles with the OS at all. it's all worked flawlessly. never anything frozen or anything.

but right now all randomly. everything. EVERYTHING is freezing, me typing in this gets the spinny beachball. finder keeps freezing, firefox keeps freezing, msn keeps freezing, emptying the trash freezes finder... like literally. everything i do/open/close/ freezes,
i've restarted my com, repaired permissions. nothing.

anyone had anything like this before?

i've done nothing out of the ordinary. just another night on msn/email..
i'm on the latest version of Lion btw, everything upto date.

cheers!
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
One of the typical symptoms of a dying hard drive.
 

bobtomay

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Quite serious. I've had them seem to boot just fine, but as soon as you're booted and click on just about anything it could take a minute to 7 minutes or longer to do anything. I've had 2 WD Green drives brand new do this in the last year - one within the first 2 weeks and the other lasted about 9 months. WD was pretty good though and had a replacement at my door in 48 hours after an email.

This seems to be happening more often now than the dreaded clicking noise we all came to recognize for many years.
 
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that sounds like the issue here.
how long do i have?

i cant afford to lose my data
 

dtravis7


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Do you have any external drive you can back up too using time machine? With it doing what it's doing, I would back up ASAP.

Which Mac do you have?
 
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i have an external yes, but i have no idea how to use time machine. what do i do with it? i know what it is. just no idea how to use it.

i have a 2.66ghz 20" imac bought start of 2009
 

bobtomay

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You should already have your data backed up - if not, you could be too late.

If it were happening to me, I would quit using the drive.
Get a new one, install it, get the OS installed.
Get an external drive and create a backup before you do anything else.
Get either a USB universal IDE/SATA adapter or hard drive dock to be able to connect your now removed hard drive and attempt to salvage what you can. Just a couple of examples for externally connecting bare drives.
 
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m4c5tuff4r3tr0115

I personally don't believe this problem sounds like a hardware issue. :Not-Amused:
Backup backup backup backup.

To help clarify:

How old is your Mac?
Do you notice any corruption of files/folders?
Is the computer making any unusual sounds?

I would suggest clearing out your cache files from the Library/Caches and
Users/<Your Name>/Library/Caches directories. After this, re-boot.

Do you notice any improvement/degrading in stability and performance after this?

Worst comes to worst, you may be looking at either a re-install of operating system or installation of new hard drive to fix the problem. With your backup, both of these should be a breeze.

Western Digital Black Edition or Seagate Barracuda 1TB
Look for 64mb cache and 2 or more platters (disks) around $100


Hope this helps,


Trolly Mc Trolls ;D
 
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21" iMac 2.9Ghz 16GB RAM - 10.11.3, iPhone6s & iPad Air 2 - iOS 9.2.1, ATV 4Th Gen tvOS, ATV3
I would be asking how much FREE space do you have on your Machine ?? What size is the HD and how much free HD do you have as Apple recommend 10-15% free HD for the system to work at its optimum. Any less than this and you will see : EVERYTHING is freezing, me typing in this gets the spinny beachball. finder keeps freezing, firefox keeps freezing, msn keeps freezing, emptying the trash freezes finder . .. . .. . . I somehow don't think it can be this as if its happened all of a sudden then i go with bobtomay's effort in suggesting its your HD failing.
As too what and how to use TM, i suggest you have a read of Mac 101: Time Machine

HTH

Cheers
 
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loads of free space.
no clicking sounds.
no corrupt files.

everything backed up.
computer is still going. freezing seems to have stopped.
cache was cleared too. although it only had about 2mb in it.

I think i go with trolly's view that it's not hardware since the problem is gone as randomly as it came.
maybe it was just a spotlight revamp of all the files on the computer, who knows.

what can i say. its a Mac. it just works.
 
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Sounds like the problem is solved but thought I would add a comment.

My grown daughter uses her pre Intel G5 daily for her home business. She is fabulous on the software but doesn't know the computer. She was told her hard drive was going. I got her a new iMac 27" i7 3.4 gH 8 GB. and brought it to her home for Thanksgiving. Her G5 would barely respond. Mostly Beachball. I setup the new iMac and got ready for Migration Assistant. BUT after a day on the phone with Apple. I could not get control of the G5 Finder to get control of her machine. Applecare was certain the HD was dead. We drove an hour to the nearest Apple store and after a couple of hours they declared the HD dead but found a way to "target it' and started Migration Assistant. The next day we picked the computers up. The 'new' user was there! But now on the brand new big machine I got the beachball, slow response, but has some response at maybe 3 second delay.

Now for the statement. How could this be. Well I stumbled on it. My daughter had over 22,000 (twenty two thousand) files on the desktop!! On her G5 it looked like 50 on the screen, but somehow all everything for 6 years was saved to the desktop. It was not easy, but slowly doable to move the files to a few folders and the speed of the machine returned to normal. I had to leave her home after the weekend and was having trouble moving the files on the old G5, but she now has an old machine she can use for watching DVDs or something.
 

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