DESPERATE: My Mac keeps freezing and lagging.

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I had been noticing for about a week that my computer was starting to get a little too hot and lagged rarely for brief seconds. I did some research and found out my kernal_task was taking up a lot of RAM, so I promised myself when I get home in a month I'd upgrade it with what I could. However, the real issue started about two days ago. Everything has basically come to a standstill. It takes about 5 minutes to start up my computer, everything lags or freezes and crashes. It froze 10 times in my writing a 4-lined email which my computer then proceeded to send out each time it froze, so the poor receiver got a new piece of e-mail every 10 seconds. It only froze for about 20 seconds, then loosened up. Now, everything freezes and I have to make a hard reboot (been done about 5 times today and it's only 1.00pm). I have used MacKeeper to clean everything out, I removed Microsoft Office, Steam, Firefox and whatever else I could that seemed to be having issues thru AppCleaner and STILL I am astonished I could open Safari to communicate my issue to the world because none of those steps helped anything!
I don't have access to a Genius Bar so I can't take it in right now and I'm absolutely at my wits end and desperate for help. I have a big deadline for a design collection due in a week and I can barely open Illustrator. ANY advice is appreciated. :Grimmace:

Macbook Pro OS X 10.6.8
2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Due
4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
 

chscag

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It sounds like your hard drive may be dying. Boot your machine with your Snow Leopard install DVD and run Disk Utilities from the disk. Do a verify and repair on the hard drive. Let's see what it says.

And get rid of MacKeeper, it's junk ware.
 
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It sounds like your hard drive may be dying. Boot your machine with your Snow Leopard install DVD and run Disk Utilities from the disk. Do a verify and repair on the hard drive. Let's see what it says.

And get rid of MacKeeper, it's junk ware.

My snow Leopard disk is on the other side of the planet. I can have it shipped and maybe receive it within a week but is there any other temporary solutions I can use until then?
 

chscag

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Your install DVD should be just like your American Express Card - never leave home without it. :)

OK, well let's try this = Boot the machine into single user mode:

1. Shut down your Mac if it is on.
2. Press the power button to start the computer.
3. Immediately press and hold the Command (Apple) key and
the "s" key for single-user mode. (Command-S)

Once you've entered into single user mode you should see white lettering on a black background. (Similar to an old fashioned DOS prompt.)

Enter the following command: /sbin/fsck -fy

Report back what it said.
 
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:/root# /sbin/fsck -fy
**/dev/rdisk0s2
**Root file system
Executing fsck_hfs version diskdev_cmds-491.6~3
**Checking journaled HFS Plus volume
**Checking extents overflow file
**Checking catalog file
Disk0s2: I/O error
Invalid node structure
(4, 15026)
**The volume Macintosh HD could not be verified completely
*****FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED*****
:/root#

I just thought you should know I had to write that all on my phone because my computer no longer loads beyond the white Apple start up screen after I did that.
 

dtravis7


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Either the drive is dying like chscag said or it's totally corrupt which is where your OSX install DVD will come in. I would tell you to open Disk Utility and see what the SMART status was for the drive, but without the DVD and since you can not boot into oSX, it's not going to work.
 

chscag

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As dtravis7 stated, the hard drive has seen better days. As we suspected, it has problems. The command line verify and repair that you did made some changes and possibly tried to do some repairs but it looks like the drive is too far gone and it quit.

At this point in time and with the invalid node structure error, I suspect you're looking at a new hard drive. Hopefully you have a backup that you made otherwise you may lose all your data. If that drive can not be accessed, even recovery software will not work.
 
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Could you please clarify some things for me:

How old is your computer?
Do you notice any sounds (ticking/scratching/ect) from the harddrive during boot ect?
Are any files/folders corrupt or unable to open?
How much disk space do you have remaining?

I would suggest, if you have not already, clearing out your cache files from:

1) Library/Caches
2) Users/<Your Name>/Library/Caches

After this, re-boot.

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

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 a backup of your valuable documents, both of these should be a breeze.


Hope this helps,


Trolly Mc Trolls ;D
 

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