Imac Spinning Beach Ball after about 3 minutes of operation.

I get the spinning beach ball (SBBOD) after a few minutes of operation. The hard drive is indexing as well. I tried booting the computer in Safe Mode and I get NO beach ball and the computer seems to be perfectly fine. I recently upgraded my hard drive about 6 months ago. I am not sure if this is a hardware or software problem. I also tried running the hardware test, but I downloaded lion via the App Store and pressing "D" at boot up doesn't do anything. I am about ready to erase my hard drive and try to re-install my info from time machine. Unfortunately, I haven't done a back up in quite a while. Any suggestions?

SBBOD can be caused by many things. I'd recommend reading XLab's
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
article, it's about the best article on troubleshooting what is causing your specific problem.

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Help - spinning beach ball w/one minute of Leopard install left on G5.

I just tried installing Leopard (10.5.4) on my G5 single with "archive and install". It worked fine until the end, where I got a message saying that the installation was almost complete - a minute left. After about 10 minutes, I clicked on the "utilities" menu in the menu bar and suddenly got a spinning beach ball. The progress bar stopped moving at the same time. The situation remained the same for over an hour before I shut down my G5.
I rebooted without the install DVD and got an intro video and then Migration Manager kicked in. The video and Migration Manager continued recycling if anything besides migrating system and network prefs. I went for that as I thought that the other bits could probably be transfered later. I got the following error message:
"Networking settings could not be transferred correctly"
I booted into the system. Looong boot up with a yellowish-white screen, then a black one and then finally I got a prompt to set settings, register, etc. Access to the Internet through my router worked, I also suddenly got a prompt that updates to the system were available. I decided things couldn't get that much worse, so I updated to 10.5.5. The system rebooted and things still seem to be working, though I still think the system boot is long compared to Tiger.
Looking at the bright side, I have what seems to be a working system. I also have a folder on the drive labeled "previous system". What do I do now?
1) Should I boot from the install DVD and run Disk Utility to check disk is OK and permissions are fine?
2) How do I get all of my user stuff, apps, preferences registration keys, etc. (particularly my Mail prefs, mailboxes, accounts, etc.) transfered from the "previous system"?
3) Can I just move the OS 9 stuff that was with Tiger to the trash?
I waited as long as I did to upgrade to Leopard, to make sure that Apple had sussed out the upgrade procedure. This obviously still isn't the case.
Cheers

You can get your stuff back from Previous System, you will find your old system inside stamped by date and time of the installation, inside Users folder you will find your old home folder name which contains all your things like Desktop, Documents, Library, Music, Movies and Public
Just copy and paste things from your home folder to your new home folder and that applies to your Library folder which stores all your settings, preferences and things like Mail, Contacts, keychain passwords. But be careful because if you copy any problematic file, it will probably cause problems.
If you want for example to copy all your mails, copy the Mail (messages) and Mail Downloads (attachments) folders from your old Library folder to your new Library folder, then in order to copy your Mail Accounts settings and the Mail application preferences, copy a file named com.apple.mail.plist from your old /Library/Preferences to the same exact location in your new system and so on, your contacts are inside /Library/Application Support/Address Book and your safari bookmarks are inside /Library/Safari but if it's FireFox, it's inside /Library/Application Support/FireFox
hope that helps

Slow and spinning beach balls after 10.8.2 update

After the initial install of ML 10.8 for the most part the sytem seemed to run fine. Very few snags. But after the 10.8.1 and now the 10.8.2 updates I am finding slower and slower times for programs to boot and waiting to be able to type anything and spinning beach balls all the time. I have noticed this continuously bringing up the contacts program, MS word, Pages, Apple Mail etc. Initial booting of the computer is slower as well and often has a frozen beach ball for a minute or so before it unfreezes and proceeds. Also huge slow down in printing from my wifi printer which before was super fast. I have reset the SMC, Pram, did disk permission repairs and all of those items. Nothing has changed anything. This is a early 15" 2011 MBP unit with 8 gig of ram, 750 gig hard drive with only 250 gig in use, 2.2 I7 processor and Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB. All software is updated to latest versions. This slower and slower and waiting thing is getting continuously worse all the time and very annoying. If anyone has any ideas I am open to suggestions to find a solution. Thanks much.

Seems we have a lot of people with simular problems but a lot of different combonations. Cleaning caches, reseting Pram, taking almost everything out of login items even using a program to defrag the unit, (mine is not a SSD drive), making sure all apps etc. are up to date and are ML ok etc. I have all done. I even had the unit tested by the Gen. Bar guys to make sure the hardware was ok including the drive even though I was pretty sure it was as I did not have this problem before ML. All checked out fine. I have not in the past had any problem with Time Machine backups but?????????? I only use a usb external and plug it in when I want to do a back up so it is not doing the backup thing all the time. I have thought of doing the erase and clean install which will be a huge amount of work but I have read many postings saying they have done that and it did not solve the problem so reluctant to do that if in the end I will spend two days for nothing? Could go back to SL or Lion as I have bootable backups but why should I have to do this on a year old MBP to make it work properly? Seems there ought to be a solution on this but Apple does not seem to have one? As I said in my original post all seemed good for the first month of ML then it began going down hill and has continued to ever since. I did notice last night that something strange seemed to help for a little while. I loged out of the unit as I have auto login and when I relogged in all seemed much quicker and better but today it has started to slow down again? I know everyone with this problem would like a solution!

IMac - spinning beach ball and freezing problems

I've had my white-screen Intel processor iMac for almost two years and its run incredibly well up until the last couple of weeks. Now whenever I switch applications, click on menus, play videos, etc the spinning beach ball appears on the screen for up to two minutes at a time. In some cases it gets so bad the computer needs to have a hard shut down.
This seems to happen in every application so its not only occurring when I'm doing certain tasks. When the beach ball appears it even pauses a song if its playing in iTunes.
I've already done a Command-S boot and also tried disk utility and both are telling me there aren't any hard drive problems.
Is anyone else having this kind of trouble? thanks

I'm having the same problem, but on my MacBook Pro... just started today. I'm even having a hard time filling out this web form.
I've run the UNIX maint scripts, repaired permissions, rebooted, everything simple... plenty of free ram, plenty of free HD space (53GB), no CPU usage (2-5% background stuff), no network traffic... just trying to use my Intel MacBook Pro...
Help!?

Constant spinning beach balls after upgrading to Lion

I upgraded to Lion on a mid 2010 MacBook Pro. Ever since I have been dealing with constant spinning beach balls every time I log in to anything, type, browse on both Firefox and Safari, or scroll up and down a page. I have 8GB RAM, have reset the PRAM, restarted often, all is completely updated. Anyone else have this problem and what to do about it? It's extremely annoying and hard to get anything done! Thanks, karen

This is the info received from another post.
Reinstalling Lion
Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alterhatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Continue button.
Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.

Pages spinning beach ball for 2 minutes opening document

Every time I open a pages or numbers document I get a spinning beach ball for a very long time.
Some examples:
36kb pages doc: 56sec to open first time; close, then reopen - 16sec.
115kb numbers doc: 1min46sec to open;
117kb pages doc: 2min29sec to open;
That's ridiculous, right? Or is it like this for everyone? This is after a FRESH install of lion on brand new SSD (everything else works great), and a FRESH install of iWork '09. It was the same with the migrated version of the app - I reinstalled it, including fresh plist files, thinking that would help. No difference. I routinely repair permissions as well.
Here's my specs:
Mac Pro 1.1 2.66 GHZ
6GB RAM
SSD Boot drive
Home folder on seperate drive (no latency with any other apps)
iWork '09 Up to date (pages 4.1 for example)
Any thoughts are much appreciated.
-FD

I have got the same problem, with Pages but also with "Password Wallet". There seems to be some problem with the "Mobile Documents" folder but I could not figure out how to solve it.
I tried to deactivate iClouds "Documents and Data" feature and thought this might solve the problem, but now I always get the spinning beachball - with "Documents and Data" checked or unchecked
Btw: I have a OWC SSD and wonder if the spinning beachball might have something to do with the SSD? But why does it only occur with some apps?

Spinning beach ball after hard drive upgrade

Im running a macbook pro i7 2.2ghz 8gb ram version 10.6.8 SL
I recently upgraded my 128gb ssd to a 512gb ssd drive. I cloned the drive to new drive and ever since then, I get the spinning beach ball very often whereas I never got it prior to the hard drive upgrade. Is there anything I can check or do to eliminate the freeze ups? It is VERY annoying. Or do I just need to do a fresh install on the new hard drive.
thanks in advance

Did you properly prep the drive first:
Drive Preparation
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
If you are preparing an external or a non-startup drive, then open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

Safari Spinning Beach Ball after 10.5.5, Camera Raw Update, and Rmt Desktop

Safari is having real problems after remote desktop and camera raw update. Safari is totally unusable. Spinning beach ball forever and brings the entire machine to a hault. Hope someone can help with a fix soon
I zapped the pram. Tried deleting safari preferences. Cleaned out all the caches and histories. Rebuilt the permissions. Reset safari and reboot many times. No love.
I am now in the process of reapply the combo updater for 10.5.5, and repairing thee premissions one last time.

Hi,
If Safari continues to misbehave, Save your Bookmarks by using File/Export Bookmarks and any other personal information you have stored. Delete the Safari and app, download and reinstall:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
Make sure and run Disk Utility from your Applications/Utilities folder and Repair Disk Permissions BEFORE and AFTER each and every update or upgrade.
Carolyn

2009 iMac spinning beach ball all the time except windows 7

Please Help
I have a early 2009 iMac every time I boot into OS X and click on more than 2 things no matter what I get the spinning beach ball for ever but in Windows 7 everything is fine
reinstalled 10.5.6 that come with iMac countless times Apple hardware test is fine Memtest is fine changed harddrive no change opened iMac up and cleaned fans and everything else no change Changed keyboards and mouse no change its got me stumped why Windows 7 works fine but OS X does not had iMac since 2009 never had problem before.
PS nothing but keyboard and mouse connected to iMac
Thanks Mark

Yes I am doing a complete erase of the hard drive and installing OS X brand new
as far as hard drives I am only using one at a time, I changed out to a brand new harddrive
If the logic board is failing WHY is windows 7 running fine with no problems I do not understand I have had macs all my life never had problems like this before
When Spotlight is indexing it just takes so long and does not finish as far as I know it should not take longer than 10 mins on a fresh system
any other things you could think of would be good as at the moment its just a very expensive Windows machine
Thanks Mark

Frequent Spinning Beach Ball after SSD Upgrade

I have several original MacPro's (2.66GHz quad core) each with 10GB of memory and all running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8) - please no comments that I need to upgrade to Snow Leopard or Lion. I have replaced the original hard drive in two of them with a brand new 120GB solid state hard drive (cloning the information from the original hard drive to the SSD using Disk Utility) and all is well.
This morning, I repeated the same upgrade process on a 3rd MacPro. Since the upgrade, I am getting frequent spinning beach ball cursors sometimes when performing the most simplest of tasks:
1. Opening System Preferences
2. Clicking the Apple menu.
3. Opening an application.
4. Pressing Command-Shift-A to access the Applications folder.
I have ran Disk Utility and it finds nothing wrong. I thought it might be something to do with Spotlight indexing the drive so I let it completely index the drive. Still having frequent spinning beach ball cursors.
What am I missing? I have 7 MacPro's all bought at the same time, all configured exactly the same (hardware, software, everything!).
Please help!
TIA,
Jon

In brief, there are threads with pros and cons of cloning the OS to an SSD vs clean install.
There is always the issue of what make/controller/firmware SSD you used.
Are all of them the very same? hard to do with all the changes going on and with OWC issuing firmware update for their controller firmware (SandForce 2200 series I think).
3G? 6G?
http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#SSD_OWC_6G
I think one reason for OS X is it may handle an SSD different (or not).
I used Dec 2010 Corsair 3Gs in my 1,1 model just fine: 2 x 40GB and 1 x 120GB with no issue for months.
What's different? the model and firmware of your latest SSD. And always a chance it is a dud. Or Disk Utility isn't always best for cloning, even with hdd it isn't and many use CCC or better perhaps SuperSuper.
So there are threads, trouble cloning an SSD, and the recommendations to just clean install and use Setup Assistant. And of course move your home media and data to standard type drive.
Something else worth considering:
SoftRAID 4.3

:20 spinning beach ball after importing a clip

I have an annoying problem that I hope someone can help me with. This has never happened with any of the 8-10 iMovie projects I have done since I started using the program a couple of years ago.
When I find a piece of footage I want to capture, I go through the process of doing do, then click stop when finished importing the particular clip. Then, as normal, I will get a very brief drop down message stating that iMovie is generating thumbnails/processing event, and it would appear iMovie is ready for me to capture more footage. But, the very moment I move the arrow cursor, a spinning beach ball appears and continues to spin for 15-20 seconds. They at the end of this 15-20 seconds, a very brief drop down message appears noting that iMovie is "optimising movie."
It's a very annoying problem that I have never had before with any other projects. I've tried shutting down/restarting to no avail. I have plenty of space available on the hard drive and there are no other programs running simultaneously with iMovie.
Thank you in advance.
Gary

I have been capturing with a Sony MiniDV but I also tried a second JVC MiniDV camera as well, thinking that perhaps it might make a difference. It did not make a difference.
Also, I am not running the stabilization at the time of import as the footage was taped on a tripod.
Message was edited by: coachgrd

IMac Spinning Beach Ball

I just bought an iMac about 4 months ago and it already is getting beach ball spins of up to 1 minute long. If I wait the full minute it stops and everything seems to go back to normal, until a little later in the day when it does it again. It will do this at least 3 to 4 times a day. I have over 100GBs of free space in my Hard Drive, 4GB of Ram....I've tried different Ram sticks. I can't pin point it to any specific application either. It is starting to get really annoying. I've done repairs on the disk and that hasn't done anything. I've also tried to check the disk with the repair utility in the install disk.
Can anyone assist me on what this could be? I'm new to macs and I am a little puzzled if this is normal behavior?

I would recommend reading this article:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
It should give you some insight into what's happening and how to prevent the beach balls.
We really can't tell what is happening because you haven't provided much information. Next time please let us know what applications you are running and what you were doing when it began. Also we have no idea what the configuration of your iMac is so please complete your profile.
Regards,
Roger

CS6 InDesign Won't Stop Spinning Beach Ball After Opening

My Mac was acting up tonight and it told me some InDesign-related files were damaged in the process. Now when I open InDesign or an InDesign file, I can’t do anything with the application because the beach ball keeps spinning after the application is launched and I have to force quit it. I tried deleting the preference file and uninstall InDesign and install it again and no luck.
Any help or advice would be appreciated.

I just uninstall and reinstall InDesign and saw this error report:
Exit Code: 6 Please see specific errors and warnings below for troubleshooting. For example, ERROR: DF027, DW063 ... -------------------------------------- Summary -------------------------------------- - 0 fatal error(s), 3 error(s), 0 warning(s) ----------- Payload: {CFC3110A-491C-4DBF-A97D-66C567600A2F} Photoshop Camera Raw 7 7.0.0.0 ----------- ERROR: DF027: Unable to copy file from "/private/tmp/.tempdirz5ISanI4/Assets1/universal/Camera Raw.plugin/Contents/MacOS/Camera Raw" to "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-Ins/CS6/File Formats/Camera Raw.plugin/Contents/MacOS/Camera Raw" (Seq 10) ERROR: DW063: Command ARKCopyFileCommand failed.(Seq 10) ERROR: DW050: The following payload errors were found during install: ERROR: DW050: - Photoshop Camera Raw 7: Install failed -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
System Requirements

ITunes 11 hangs (spinning beach ball) in Mountain Lion

Whenever I open iTunes, it hangs with a spinning beach ball for about three minutes. During this time, Activity Monitor shows iTunes (not responding) using 90–130% of the CPU.
After a few minutes, the beach ball stops and iTunes works fine...for a while. Double clicking on any audio file on my desktop, sets off the spinning beach ball again for another three minutes, at which time iTunes becomes responsive again, but the sound file does not play.
I've tried tossing the iTunes preferences and running Disk Warrior to no avail. I'm running 10.8.2 on my mid-2007 iMac. Any ideas/suggestions for troubleshooting?

Okay, I think I've finally solved my problem. I moved my entire iTunes library from one hard drive to another, then I deleted everything from iTunes (selected all songs, hit delete key, but didn't delete songs from disk) and then reimported them by dragging my Music folder into iTunes.
I'm not sure if moving the songs from one disk to another really helped, but deleting and reinstalling the songs definitely did.
I actually let iTunes perform a "scan for music" to reinstall the tracks, but that never seems to bring in everything. I had to drag in all of my compilation disks and some other miscellaneous tracks. P.I.T.A.
But, the good news is iTunes no longer hangs.

Spinning beach ball and slower performance

I have been noticing that the performance of my iMac is becoming slower, with the dreaded spinning beach ball apearing whenever I change between applications to perform relatively basic functions. However, the worst is when I am in iTunes, where I experience the spinning beach ball for several minutes after connecting and choosing a device, and I typically cannot do anything else in other applications until it stops. As for other applications, I have nearly abandoned Aperture because anything from scrolling to adjustments will cause the spinning beach ball to return several seconds to minutes.
My iMac is a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with nearly 30g's left on the hard drive. I have the memory max'd at 4GB. I am running OS X 10.7.2 with all apps completely up to date. Overall, I am doing basic functions in Bento, Pages, and surfing Safari on a daily basis with only the minimal applications needed open at once.
Is there anything I can do to resolve this?

Hi Todd, thanks for the reply. Actually, I do have CS6 via my Creative Cloud membership but I'm having to work in 5.5 on this particular client's system for a project.
I was hoping that the above solution would be the answer I was searching for but alas, that is apparently not the case, since the issues have returned and the spinning beach ball continues to churn... (nothing like the elation of finding a solution only to later feel crushing defeat as the problem returns...)
The issues were resolved for a while, so perhaps this post may still be able help someone. I'd rather be working in CS6 right now, and I'm pushing for this client to do the upgrade as well. Considering how much time is being wasted waiting for the Mac to continue after hanging every other keystroke, I'd think the client would be anxious to make the change!

Imac Spinning Beach Ball after about 3 minutes of operation.

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