Save As = spinning beach ball = freeze = what the!

Short Story: in various applications, at various times, the program stops responding and Force Quit does not work. Usually this occurs when using the SAVE AS function.
Long Story. I have an eMac G4 that was running 10.3.8. it was networked at home via airport with an eMac, TiPB and Cube. All was good. Then we moved. I reestablished my home network, but this time will all 'puters hooked up via ethernet. My eMac then started experiencing bad behavior. For example, iDVD would hang when burning a DVD. Or, MS Word would hang when printing to PDF. Or when i tried using save as. Force Quit would appear to work, forcing the window to close. but the dock would still show the program open. when i return to Force Quit, the offending program would be there in red (not responding). Other open programs would then do same thing. only recourse would be to do a hard restart.
i bought 10.4.3 (family pack) and upgraded all 'puters. Same problem.
i ran disk utilities to both repair permissions and repair disks. Same problem.
i bought disk warrior and ran it several times. same problem.
i tried some shareware, YASU 1.3.5. Same problem.
i have trashed preferences for all programs. Same problem.
i have NOT bought Tech Tool Pro. Should I?
i have not run any virus software detection/protection. Should I?
i do not think it is a RAM problem, although i have only 512m. the problem manifests itself whether only one or multiple programs are open.
the problem is not occurring on the networked 'puters.
my wife has even began suggesting we buy a PC. that is how bad this is. any ideas

i do not have a .mac account. i checked my preferences on that point and confirmed there is no effort to sync with iDisk.
i am only user (account) on this eMac. So i do not have a basis for compaing other users. i may set up a dummy account (other dummy?) to test this theory.
i checked my energy saver prefs. i had computer and display set to Never sleep. i had the box checked to put disk to sleep when possible. i have now unchecked that box.
i also have just downloaded update to 10.4.4. so, i will try that.
any other ideas, most appreciated. i am especially interested to know if there is software to look for possible virus infection that might cause this. since it happens randomly, i suspect it might be some bug (not sure if that is logical analysis on my part)
steve

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Just ran a recent update, and computer woke up with plain blue screen and spinning beach ball, was it the update that made the computer crash?

just ran a recent update for my macbook pro/mid 2010, and the computer just woke up with a plain blue screen & spinning beach ball - I had to do a hard shut down.
I am also having the problem of having my screen going black for a couple of seconds, I read up on it in Support. But I was wondering if there is something else going on.
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thanks

Hmm sounds like a bad update, follow the links here
cheat sheet has a link to blue screen issues
do a data recovery first
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

IMac 20" was running very slow (could not even scroll without the spinning beach ball of death), The computer was operating on OSX 10.5. After a lot of attempts of diagnostic attempts, have resorted to an erase and reinstall. says it will take 60 hours!

Working on my friends iMac 20" computer. It is 2.66 ghz, and was running 4mb of ram when the computer started acting up on OSX 10.5.
When I was called over the computer was so slow that I could not even scroll without getting the beach ball of death. I checked the activities moniter, and found an HP application was taking up 46% of the CPU. We attempted to go in and uninstall all of the HP applications, but the computer ended up freezing. Ended up doing a hard shut down, and decided to run disk utilities. Repaired both Permissions, and Disk. Restarted... no difference. Thought of restoring the computer to when it was working fine via Time machine in disk utility mode... failed. Finally resorted to deleting the hard drive, reinstalling Tiger, and upgrading.
After what seemed like forever for the hard drive to erease, attempted to reinstall. Ended up taking almost an hour to verify the disk, and then announced, that it would take 58+ hours to install. After leaving it for 3 hours, the number was going up, and was not installing.
I then thought the problem would be the 2nd party ram. We replaced the paired 2mb's to give 4mb's with the origional paired 1mb's providing now 2 mb's. Attempted to reinstall osx. Same problem 60+ hours after 3 hours of letting it sit.
What to do now? Is it the logic board? Could it be a faulty hard drive? Should I attempt in firewire more from another computer? Do a 7 pass erase over the hard drive? Run Disk warrior?
If anyone could give some info on why this is so blessedly slow that would be great thanks!

Decided to try and chek out the hard drive more extensively. SMART, states that it is verified. After running Diskwarrior and repairing all of the disk and the permissions, and running a hardware test, everything seemed to be running fine.
Went back to disk utilities, checked disk and permissions again, verified. SMART states it is verified.
Attemping now to install Mac OSX 10.4.7 from the original install disk. I am currently attemting the basic install, no programs, nothing. It has been over an hour, It is 44% of installing the base system Part 1, announcing 5 hours and 53 minutes.
When I did erase the hard drive yes I selected to write over zeros once. I then erased a second time from Diskwarrior.

Spinning Beach Ball Freeze with HFS: err 5

Ever since I upgraded to 10.5.x my iMac has been freezing more and more often. I noticed that every time the machine froze with the beach ball spinning so was the Time Machine indicator. I reformatted my LaCie HD that I was using to GUID and most (but not all) of the freezes have subsided. I have a second LaCie HD that I use for video (named Video HD)which along with my internal HD is part of my Time Machine back-up. Last evening my machine froze in the usual manner. I grabbed the console messages and saw:
7/7/08 7:48:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 7:48:13 PM kernel HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Video HD)
7/7/08 7:49:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 7:52:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 7:52:13 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4279] Starting standard backup
7/7/08 7:56:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 7:56:43 PM kernel HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Video HD)
7/7/08 7:57:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 7:59:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 7:59:43 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4279] Backing up to: /Volumes/TM HD/Backups.backupdb
7/7/08 8:04:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:04:13 PM kernel HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Video HD)
7/7/08 8:04:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:07:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:09:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:12:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:16:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:16:43 PM kernel HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Video HD)
7/7/08 8:17:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:19:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:22:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:24:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:29:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:29:13 PM kernel HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Video HD)
7/7/08 8:29:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:32:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:32:13 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4279] No pre-backup thinning needed: 614.0 MB requested (including padding), 136.86 GB available
7/7/08 8:32:18 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4279] Copied 2940 files (4.1 MB) from volume Shapiro HD.
7/7/08 8:36:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:36:43 PM kernel HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Video HD)
7/7/08 8:37:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:39:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:39:43 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4279] Error: (-36) copying /Volumes/Video HD to (null)
7/7/08 8:39:43 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4279] Copied 2941 files (4.1 MB) from volume Video HD.
7/7/08 8:44:13 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
7/7/08 8:44:13 PM kernel HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Video HD)
7/7/08 8:44:43 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
Any help decoding HFS: err 5 would be greatly appreciated. Oh, I've updated to the latest system (using the Combo updater and have already run Disk Utility and Disk Warrior on the Video HD.
Thanks

Error 5 is an I/O error, which you're getting back from the filesystem after an attempted read (the reason you see explicit I/O errors and error 5's is that likely the driver is reporting one, and the filesystem is reporting the other). IMO, whatever is mounted at device disk1s2 is bad. Your reformats, repairs, etc may have remapped some bad sectors on that disk, but clearly hasn't repaired all of them (or, the disk is continuing to fail with new bad spots).
I would suggest that you make a backup of your system somewhere other than whatever is on disk1s2. I'd then retire that disk...

My MacBook is very slow and constantly has the spinning beach ball of death!!!

In the last couple if weeks my MacBook has suddenly slowed down a LOT. Sometimes it takes ages for it to boot up when I turn it on and at other times not as long. Then once I log in, as soon as I click on something, the spinning beach ball appears and won't go away so I have to force it to restart.
It runs a little bit faster in safe mode and if I log in as a guest user, but it's still relatively slow.
So far I have tried the following:
- starting in safe mode
- resetting PRAM
- turning off then pressing ctrl, option, left shift and the power button for 10 seconds then turn it back on
- repairing disk permissions
I've been told that it might be best to reformat my mac, but in order to do this I need to back up. I bought a Seagate Back Up Plus 1TB and tried to use time machine. After a while a message popped up saying "Time Machine Error. Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder.". There is something on my hard drive, but I cant tell if my mac has fully backed up or not.
Any suggestions?

How large is your HD and how much space do you have left?
Check out the following & do the necessary:
User Tip: Why is my computer slow?
What to do when your computer is too slow
Speeding up your Mac
===========
Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball/freezing & crashing
Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball
Apple OSX and Time Machine Tips (Leopard - ML
Mac Basics: Time Machine
OS X Mountain Lion: Alternatives for backing up your Mac
User Tip: Most commonly used backup methods
Emergency backups you didn't know you had!

Added user accounts all freeze (spinning beach ball)

Why do all user accounts (other than my main administrator account) freeze after logging in. The Finder freezes with the spinning beach ball just when the account seems to have logged in properly. I created new accounts (thinking that my old accounts were corrupted), but the new accounts did the same thing. My main user account is fine. I haven't used the other accounts for a while now, so why would they suddenly have problems now?! Is something corrupted in my system?!
It almost seems like the Finder is waiting for something to load, but it never gets loaded-so it gives me the beach ball while it waits. Is this what is happening? I can't even force the finder to quit. I have to force the computer to shut off by using the power switch.

Hi Paul
Try this.
Determine the Username for one of these other accounts.
Write down this chosen AccountUsername.
In your main admin account, Open Terminal, found in Applications/Utilities, and enter into terminal this command, (substitute the theAccountUsername with the actual account name you wrote down)
sudo rm /Users/theAccountUsername/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
then type in your admin password. It will not appear as you type, then press Return, then type
exit
and quit Terminial.
Log out and log into that usernames's account that you just worked on.
See how that goes.
Note: if you need to Force Quit, try the four key press of Control + Option + Command + Escape to open the Force Quit Dialogue box and try and Force Quit Finder. That may give you a chance to exit normally.
Also by doing those hard shutdowns you may need to run Repair Disk from the boot Installation Disk just to check that the file structure is OK.
regards roam

The Spinning Beach Ball of Death

I have an older G5 running tiger. I recently had to replace my hard drive, which had crashed. Now, I regularly get the spinning beach ball which hangs the program that I'm in, and eventually the entire computer (i.e. I can't get back to Finder to use Force Quit). I've repaired permissions and run TechTools, and haven't found anything wrong. Any thoughts as to what I can do to fix this? It's very frustrating to deal with.
Thanks for the help.

di you update the new hard drive in Tiger using Tiger's Disk Utility. Also check ASP and see if the hard drive is recognized.

The movies from my Iphone 5 are not coming across on Apple TV. The little spinning beach ball appears like it is thinking. It use to work but quick working a month ago.

The movies from my Iphone 5 are not coming across on Apple TV. The little spinning beach ball appears like it is thinking. It use to work fine but quick working a month ago. I mirror from my phone to the Apple TV. Still images and everything I do on the phone is mirrored on to the TV except when I want to show a YouTube video or any video and then the screen on the phone and the TV screen go black and the spinning beach ball appears. The videos open right up on the phone if I do not have mirroring on and going through the Apple TV. I just downloaded the latest update to the phone it did not fix the problem. Please help. Thanks, Elvis G

Hello Elvis G,
After reviewing your post, I have located an article that can help in this situation. It contains a number of troubleshooting steps concerning device issues. You may want to consider a reset, then testing to see if the issue is resolved:
Turn your iOS device off and on (restart) and reset
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1430
How to reset
You should reset your device as a last resort and only if you can't restart it.
To reset, press and hold both the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo.
Thank you for contributing to Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
BobbyD

What causes spinning beach ball upon waking from sleep

I have a 4 year old iMac that has recently developed an intermittent problem. If I put it to sleep, sometimes on waking up, the hard drive access seems to stop. I hear a tap sound as though it was trying to read the disk, but it gets stuck and a spinning beach ball appears instead of the cursor. I can move it around, but I cannot perform any actions. The ball will stay forever if I let it.
Another variation occurs shortly after wake-up, where I start to click on a file on the desktop or even an icon in the Dock. The name will become highlighted and then the same spinning beach ball appears.
The only cure for the behavior has been to shut it down and reboot. It then works fine.
The weird thing is that I have just been using it for 6 hours straight with out any hassles... until I will put it to sleep!
I have tried running Disk Utility from the Leopard System Disk as well as repairing permissions and I have used Disk Warrior 4 . It seemed to allow about 6-8 sleep cycles before the symptoms re-appeared.
I verified the disk and repaired the permissions again yesterday and all seemed OK. Yet today, when I started up from sleep. the system froze. The only cure so far is to never allow the hard drive to sleep. I put the display to sleep after 15 minutes but the hard drive continues to spin.
I am concerned that not sleeping the hard drive will do harm to it.
I am using OS 10.5.8 on a 233 Ghz Core 2 Duo iMac
I have Parallels 4 installed and cannot tell you if the problems started after a PC session.

HI Studio Guy,
Welcome to the forums. When ever your having trouble with a computer; it's really a good idea to back every thing up. If your not backing up; http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427 explains how to back up your computer to an external hard drive. (assuming your using 10.5 or 10.6)
You could try running a hardware test on the computer. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1509
You could try a safeboot, it can repair lots of issues. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1455
This article explains how to delete the sleep image; a bad sleep image can cause wake from sleep issues. http://osxdaily.com/2010/10/11/sleepimage-mac/
But if your hard drive is rapidly making a taping noise you may want to take it to a genius bar; they might recommend replacing the hard drive. http://www.apple.com/retail/geniusbar/

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!?

Spinning beach ball for 45-60 seconds, then fine

For several months now, I've had the spinning beach ball issue on my Macbook Pro. Within the first 5 minutes after boot up, the spinning beach ball will occur, seemingly at random (no specific app or action), for 45-60 seconds. While this happens, the system becomes completely unresponsive. But after this occurrence within the first five minutes after startup, it never happens again and everything is fine - until I reboot of course.
I am running Snow Leopard and this problem was happening before I installed Snow Leopard, so that's not it. But one thing I did do, which I am semi-convinced is the culprit, is I replaced my hard drive with a Seagate 500 mb Momentus drive. The actual model # is SEAST9500420AS. I don't know for sure, but that's around the time this issue first started. I know there is/was a spinning beach ball problem with the newer Macbook Pros and they were attributing it to the hard drive which just so happens to be the same hard drive I now have in my Macbook Pro. There was recently an EFI update that seemed to fix the problem for the newer models, but mine is the first generation right when they went to Intel chips (bought mine in April, 2006). Problem is, if it is my drive, this new EFI update that fixes the issue on the new models won't install on mine.
I also did a verify disk and repair disk permissions, but that was no help. Another thing I found going through the discussion groups was that the problem could happen because both the Macbook Pro and the Seagate drive have anti-shock technology that could conflict with one another. So if you disabled the anti-shock on the Macbook Pro, it might solve the problem as it seemed to for some folks out there. But I did that and it didn't help either.
I'm thinking it's my hard drive, but don't know how to fix it. But it could be something I haven't looked at yet or thought of. I've been trying everything the last several months with no luck and it's been driving me batty! What's really strange is it only happens once and always within the first 5 minutes after start up. Anybody have any suggestions? Thanks.

I just finished doing lots of different tests to try to solve my problem. Didn't resolve it, but I did manage to eliminate some things and narrow it down further.
First I removed all my login items and restarted my computer. That didn't fix the problem.
So then I thought it might have something to do with Safari since that's one of the first things I open up when I start my computer and there are numerous reports in the discussions of spinning beach balls with Safari 4.0.3 which I have. So I purposely did not open Safari after startup. Problem still happened.
So then I thought maybe it has something to do with my internet connection. So I disconnected my internet connection and rebooted. Then I only opened programs that don't use online access. I leisurely opened up a program, did a few things in it, closed it, and then did the same thing with another program. Did some things with Finder. Purposely did not rush things. Waited 4-5 seconds after every operation's completion before executing another task. Never had more than one program open at any given time to eliminate any issue with two many resources open. You guessed it - the problem STILL happened. Not that it matters, but it happened when I hit Command-I on my hard drive icon to get the info pane. A fairly innocuous task. Froze up with the spinning beach ball for at least 45-50 seconds. Tried clicking a few other things while this was happening, but nothing. Once it freed up, a few things I clicked on previously suddenly became active and everything was fine again. Tried Command-I for a lot of different things with no problem. Response was instantaneous.
It pretty much happens 3-4 minutes into a session and then never happens again. And I think my test here eliminated several possibilities. Very frustrating. I hope this helps someone come up with a possible solution. Thanks.

Spinning beach ball in menu bar, sys pref does not work etc

Since last 2 days I have the following problem with Macbook:
1. When i hover the cursor over the menu bar, the beach ball appears. this is for the Mac menu items such as Airport, Spotlight, Fast switching, time & date and also for iStatmenus. However, Little Snitch menu bar indicator is not affected
2. Sysprefs also does not work. It opens up and immediately the beach ball appears and I can't click on any of the sys preferences
3. If i try to watch a video, then the video will not display, though the progress indicator will happily be progressing away (QT, VLC etc)
4. When i run in Safe mode, then everything seems to work ok (at least the menu bar, though the video part still doesn't work)
5. And also in Normal mode, Safari/Netscape Navigator/Camino et al hang & the beach ball appears, but in safe mode they work ok though very sluggish.
6. Though i can't be certain, I think all these problems began after iTunes crashed on me while running a podcast (?)
I have tried everything; repair prefs and repair disk, have run Tinkertool system2 to see if that would help but to no avail. I even downloaded and installed OS X 10.6.7 Combo update-didn't do any good.

I have been trying to deal with the same problem for the last week.
My machine is a MBP 17" 4 GB 2.6GHz, 250 GB alluminum.
1) I've immigrated my whole user apps and doc files to an IMAC 20" 2GB 2.66GHz 350 GB, and the system works just fine on the IMAC (I am using my system that used to be in the MBP right now).
2) I've over written everything on the HD with zeros and have done a clean install of SNOW LEOPARD on my MBP, but as the system got loaded, already before any working files or app files have been reinstalled, the spinning beach ball appears on the upper RIGHT portion of the menu bar and makes the system inoperable.
3) Done system update and made it into a 10.6.8 but the problem persists.
I've basically done what Ravindra had tried.
Please HELP.

Spinning beach ball on yosemite

iMac gets spinning beach ball every so often. I must wait for about 5 minutes to get back control. HD only half full. Plenty of RAM. Activity monitor doesn't show high usage of CPU or RAM when beach ball spins. Please help.

HD only half full. Plenty of RAM.
How large is your HD and how much space do you have left?
How much RAM do you have?
Which model iMac are you using?
Check out: Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball/freezing & crashing
Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball

Save As = spinning beach ball = freeze = what the!

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