Mac takes forever to load, runs slowly. Windows works fine.

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I have a problem with my Macbook. I have Snow Leopard 10.6.8 installed. When I try to boot into OS X it takes about 20 minutes to get past the blue screen after the Apple logo. Then, once I log-in, OS X runs somewhat slowly and the fans are constantly blowing. At first I tried to restore from Time Machine thinking that maybe something I had done had caused it. The Snow Leopard installation disc also took about 20 minutes to load. The Time Machine restore took much longer than usual. When I restarted the machine, OS X behaved the same. I then restored from an earlier backup, thinking maybe 10.6.8 had triggered something in the machine to go wrong. Same result. Finally, I loaded the OS X disc and tried to do a clean install of Snow Leopard in hopes that it would fix my problems. It got up to 95% after about 2 hours and then said OS X could not be installed on my hard drive.

Meanwhile, I'm able to load my boot camp partition no problem. Windows works just as it always has. It's like my Macbook wants me to use Windows or something.
 

cwa107


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14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
How much space remains on the drive labeled "Macintosh HD"?
 

cwa107


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And how big is the partition overall? And note - I'm referring specifically to the Mac partition. OS X needs about 20% free space on its system directory in order to maintain optimal performance.
 

cwa107


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Wow, that seems really tiny for even just OS X. Do you not have any applications installed on the Mac side of things, nor any data?
 
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I have my Music and Pictures on an external drive. My software is all on the OS X partition, but none of that takes up much space.
 

cwa107


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If I had to guess, I'd imagine that at least part of the problem is the constraints of the system partition. If OS X has any great failing, it's that it likes a nice, roomy system partition.

But beyond that, my first thought would be to have you do some basic maintenance with Disk Utility (run verify/repair disk and verify/repair permissions) on the OS X partition. I'd also recommend running through the maintenance tasks in Onyx.
 
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Thanks. I had already done the basics with disk utility, so I'll try Onyx. I read a post by someone from a year ago where someone said his hard drive was probably starting to go. I've been planning on getting a bigger drive for a while, so I'll probably go ahead and order one. Hopefully that's the problem.
 

dtravis7


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MacMini M-1 MacOS Monterey, iMac 2010 27"Quad I7 , MBPLate2011, iPad Pro10.5", iPhoneSE
It could very well be the hard drive but windows does seem normal but maybe the drive is dying toward the beginning where OSX is installed. When you run Disk Utility, highlight the main drive and check the SMART status on the bottom. Does it say Pass or Fail?

Early MacBooks came with a 60GB drive.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
In OS X, boot from your system install DVD and go from installer to Utilities > Disk Utility and run Repair Disk and see what is reported.
 
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Disk Utility said the drive was fine.

I find it strange that the computer is having the same reaction to both my Snow Leopard partition and the Snow Leopard install DVD. I'm going to try out my Leopard disc later and see if the computer somehow processes that ok.
 

cwa107


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Disk Utility said the drive was fine.

I find it strange that the computer is having the same reaction to both my Snow Leopard partition and the Snow Leopard install DVD. I'm going to try out my Leopard disc later and see if the computer somehow processes that ok.

That does seem odd. Exactly what model is it? Approximate year of manufacture and hardware config might help as well (amount of memory, HDD size, etc).
 

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