Stalling every few minutes.

Question

I purchased my MacBook Pro last October, and I've had to take it in to the Apple Store twice already within the span of a few months. The first time, they replaced the hard drive cable, and the second, they replaced the hard drive itself. Since I got it back the last time, it's been stalling every few minutes. The little spinning loading wheel shows up and everything freezes for a few minutes, but I'm able to move my mouse around. I have no idea what's going on with it, and I'm dreading having to take it in again, considering I live so far away from the closest Apple store. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
Does it stall when you do certain things ? or even without any activity ?
You should boot from your MacBook Pro DVD and if it doesn't freeze there, then it would be the HD or the SATA cable connecting the hard drive to the SATA port on the Main Logic Board or the on-board SATA port itself (the last one is very rare to occur however I faced it a couple of times before). Further if your Mac OS X DVD won't boot normally or having the same issue, then very likely, it would be the SATA controller which is basically the most important chip on the MLB (Integrated North & South Bridge) which connects everything together including the Processor, memory and Storage. The SuperDrive is connecting using a different SATA port on the MLB but also shared to everything through the integrated bridge chip. At this case, if you have any installed Mac OS on an external FireWire or USB drives, you should try booting from it.
First, and after booting from the DVD and select your language, go to the Menu Bar > Utilities > Disk Utility, then select your hard dive volume from the list on the left (should be Macintosh HD by default) and on the right section click on Verify Disk on the bottom right corner then see if that will return errors or tells you the disk is OK, if it returns errors then click on Repair Disk and wait to see if it will fix these errors or not, if it returns the disk to be OK, then you might have one of the two other causes.
I'm of course assuming that your issue is not by anyway related to software or OS. As you had been already visiting Apple and they addressed the issue with the cable then the HD.
Also you should hurry up because your machine will get out of warranty soon unless if you have purchased AppleCare.
Message was edited by: Hazem Malek
Message was edited by: Hazem Malek
Message was edited by: Hazem Malek