Spinning Ball- Firewire Drive question?

Question about my external drive before I go and purchase a new one...
I have one hard drive that gives me the spinning ball quite regularly now. I have booted up Disc Utility and repaired the disc. I have also used Disk Warrior (a great 3rd party app) to scan the disk, repair it's data structure and even rebuild it. I have also scanned the hard drive with ClamX AV to try and rule out some sort of virus. Why is this drive locking up my computer, freezing applications, preventing reboots, etc.? It only happens to this one external drive, so my thoughts are it's either a data structure issue, or its hardware. Am I right in that line of thinking?
Is there a core system process that handles the mounting and dismounting of external drives that could be corrupt? Can I monitor and log what is causing my drive to hang? I'm not that familiar with terminal so I have been watching 'Activity Monitor' to see what processes are in use when I

Okay, I did everything you suggested, and I believe that as soon as I had Zapped the PRAM things with the drive became remarkably better...I could eject the drive successfully, and then remount it. Thank you!
But after two days of tests I have still had some irregular issues: it has frozen iTunes once or twice, locking up multiple programs and preventing a restart until the drive is turned off.
I'll definitely try Zapping it again and see what happens, but does this ring as the beginnings of a failing drive? Should I still look to replace it? It does not have the S.M.A.R.T. function...

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Spinning ball, hard drive, macbook pro

Dear Experts
I have mid 2009 Macbook pro (2.66 Ghz). I am frequently running into spinning ball that freezes my mac even for opening Safari, iPhoto etc. I am user of CPU demending softwares. Here is what I did till now
1. Free space on HDD is 78 GB (out of 320 GB HDD)
2. Ran Disk utility --> verified.
3. SMART status is OK.
4. Fixed all permissions.
5. Ran disk tool pro--> SMART status OK
6. Fixed bad alias
7. Removed all cache, junk, trash with CleanMyMac.
However, problems is persisted. I ran a bad sector check on disk tool pro and it shows all time that scan for bad sectors is failed while rest of the tests passed. I wonder whether my HDD is failing or what? I have already backed up on Time Machine.
Any experts has comments/suggestions? That will be of great help.
Thanks
Sai

What you describe seems indicative of hard drive failure. You did yourself no favor, however, by running "CleanMyMac" which may have deleted some very important files.
I would recommend doing a full and complete reinstallation of everything. If you still have the 'beachballing' then I would try replacing the drive.
Clinton

Seagate firewire drive question

I have installed Leopard on my G4 and G5 tower with no problems.
The problem starts when I plug in a Seagate remote firewire drive. the drive is formatted as Apple Partition Map, but I am not using it as a boot disk. I have also tried formatting it as MBR.
In both cases if I have the drive plugged in when I boot to Leopard after about 3 minutes my cooling fans go to full speed and nothing else happens. If I then boot back to my Tiger it starts up fine. If I unplug this drive I can boot to Leopard with no problems.
Anyone have any idea why this is happening?
thanks

bump...

Firewire drive question

I'm not sure whom to ask, so I though you all would have some reasonable input.
I currently have 8 firewire drives, each in an external case. What I would ideally like to see is some kind of case, that I can toss a number of the drives into, and plug into my FW800 or FW400 port and would let me turn each drive on or off so I'm not causing brownouts in my neighborhood.
Cost is bit of an issue, but my media drive collection is getting out of hand. Turning on three drives so I can get at the fourth is getting old, real quick.
Any suggestions?

What you're looking for is commonly called a RAID. There really isn't a practical reason to combine several Firewire drives into one case just to share power supplies and whatnot. Firewire drives are designed for portability and flexibility. If what you're looking for is something to combine several drives, there are some reliability and configuration issues to consider.
But bottom line, it gets a little more complicated as you add more drives.
Here's one page that shows you some options:
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/hotswapsatakits.php

Spinning ball, failed drive

Not sure if this is a system problem or simply an internal hard drive issue, so I'm posting on both this board and the “Using your Power Mac G4” board.
The hardware:
PowerPC G4 dual 1.42 GHz with four internal drives:
1) IBM drive is the main drive with all applications.
2) WDC drive is the video drive – this is the one with problems.
3) A second IMB drive used for graphics
4) A second WDC drive used for audio files.
The software:
OS X 10.4.11
Final Cut Pro HD version 4.5
The Problem:
Yesterday, while doing a routine video ingest to FCP 4.5 from the same Sony DSR-20 VTR and the same Sony DVCam videotape, the spinning beach ball popped up.
I decided to take a coffee break.
30 minutes later, it stopped.
The video did not ingest, so I restarted the G4.
When everything was back up and running, I noticed that the desktop displayed only three drives.
I opened up FCP and it prompted me with a warning that I needed to change my drive destination (the video drive was missing).
I then opened up Disk Utility, and shaded, was the errant drive.
I tried to repair it but that didn’t work (error message, which I did not note).
Since I didn’t have a lot of video on that drive, I decided to just erase it and reformat it.
However, when I tried to ingest new video, I keep getting the spinning beach ball.
Today – just starting up the G4 seems to drag.
The spinning gear took longer than normal.
Once I logged on, the spinning beach ball went on for a few minutes.
Even checking the “About This Mac” took a few minutes of spinning beach ball before it opened.
I don’t use this G4 for much than large file video editing.
Projects that are 30 minutes or longer that don’t need a lot of effects go on this G4, then transferred to an archive tape.
The G4 is probably about seven years old and has worked well for what I need.
The only new addition to this G4 was last week, when I installed software “Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Released 9”.
The last software update was back in March: “Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Released 8”.
Help is appreciated!
Thanks.

Nick Holmes wrote:
To what format?
Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
May be relevant to my question above, may be that the disk is about to give up.
That's what I'm trying to find out...if the hard drive is on a slow path to death.
Not sure if I should just pull it out of the G4 and replace it or if there is a way to save & fix it.
I noticed that the "S.M.A.R.T. Status" reads "Not Supported".
That's normal with external drives.
These are all internal drives, mounted inside the G4.
I would say that no, it isn't normal, as the other three drives all read as "Verified".

Imac / spinning ball hard drive gets stuck

Hi there,
I have an i-mac g-3, but up-graded it to mac osx 10.3 (and all the apple updates)
It now seems very, very slow.
1) It often gets into a right pickle, for no reason, and the ball just sits there spinning- the only solution is a cold (mains off) restart - it wont respond to anythng else, just spinns the ball.
2) it often sends the hard drive winding and realy gurgling away (not just free spinning) like its read/writing the hard drive - a LOT!
This then brings my mac to an almost go-slow, or just freezes me out with the spinning all again (see above)
these seem to be happening with frightning regularity now, but often without provocation (ie not even during a download, sometimes when its just sat there??)
any thoughts,, thanks,,

Hi,
One thing that's not mentioned in Ferd II's links are the possiblity of bad blocks on your hard drive. They might develop over time, and can cause symptoms like what you're mentioning. To see if the problem might be bad blocks, you can open the Console application from your Utilites folder and look in the system.log.
You're looking for messages from the kernal that mention "I/O error" as the problem. The error will be on a line with a date and time, computer name, and then this:
kernel[0]: disk0s9: I/O errorThe numbers in the disk0s9 might be different, in particular the last one might not be "9".
If you do have these errors, you'll probably want to back up all your information right away, as it's a sign the drive might be failing.
You can use a program like TechTool Pro to do a surface scan and see for sure if there are any bad blocks. If there aren't many, they can be remapped by erasing the drive using the "Write Zeros" option in the Disk Utility. If there are too many, the drive can't remap them and will need to be replaced.
One final thing: just because the S.M.A.R.T. status is "Verified" doesn't mean there might not be a problem with the drive. On the other hand, if it says "About to Fail", believe it, and make sure you have a good backup of your data.
charlie

Spinning ball while the hard drives warm up

Hi guys,
I have a G-Tech 1TB (Firewire 800) hard drive, a 500GB (Firewire 400) drive and two internal sata drives (not striped together) I also have a wireless keyboard and mouse.
If I leave the computer alone for a few minutes, each time I return to FCP, I have to wait for the spinning ball to stop. It sounds like the hard drives are warming up again, but its really annoying having to wait so often. I am working in a long project of 90 minutes length, but this also happens in shorther projects as well.
I have unchecked the 'put the hard drives to sleep as often as possible' and set the energy saver to 1 hour but no difference.
Any ideas?
Thanks as always.
Stephen - UK

you can minimize occurrences of the SBBOD due to hard drive sleep by making BOTH of the following selections in the Sleep tab of Energy Saver preferences:
1. select "Never" for System sleep, and
2. de-select "Put the hard drive to sleep when possible".
in Tiger, this is GUI equivalent of sending the "pmset" command in the terminal with the argument disksleep 0
or you could just jump straight into the terminal app (/Applications/Utilities/) and use the command
sudo pmset -a spindown 0

Spinning ball problems--need to do a clean install--have questions

Hi
background:
I have a G4 (quicksilver) since July 2002, it came with OS9.2 and OS10.1.3. I've upgraded a few times since and currently have 10.3.9. I mainly work in OS9.2 due to most of my programs being used are only in 9 and the PC network I'm hooked up to likes it better. I boot up in 9.2 -- 80%of the time.
I'm not sure when the problem started in OSX since I'm not working there alot but I started to get the spinning ball in installer, software update and some preferences. So I reloaded (archive/install) from 10.3.5 upgrade disk but couldn't further upgrade to 10.3.9 due to that spinning ball-- still there even after I reloaded 10.3.5.
I've run Disk Utility from the 10.3.5 upgrade disk (repaired disk, repaired permissions) and then I again reloaded (archive install) 10.3.5 and then upgraded to 10.3.9 and this time it worked because I went immediately to the 10.3.9 to install.
BUT I still have the spinning balls in almost everything. Almost seems worse now. I can't even use Disk Utility from the utility folder on my mac without getting the spinning ball.
OS9.2 is fine and I would like to leave it that way.
But it's looking like I need to do a clean install--which means I'll have to reload OS9.2 -- correct?
My question is for a clean install do I need to go back to the original disks that came with my Mac (OS10.1.3) or can I do a clean install with the 10.3.5 upgrade disks. And if I do a clean install from 10.3.5 can I still install OS9.2?
Also what are those Software Restore disks for? They came with the original set of CDs, are they used in the clean install?
Thanks for any help you can give
Power Mac G4 (quicksilver) Mac OS X (10.3.9)
G4 quicksilver Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Keith:
Welcome to Apple Discussions.
You really should start a new topic, as threadjacking is frowned upon in these Forums.
The spinning ball or the beachball effect is a result of the computer spinning its wheels, so to speak, as it does not have sufficient computing power to deal with the task at hand. This can be caused by many things.
I am almost certain that it has nothing to do with the latest Panther update. I did them all with no problem.
Is there a way to deal with it?
1. Sufficient RAM
2. Sufficient available HDD capacity.
3. Regular maintenance.
4. Repairing Disk Permisssions before and after any installations.
In terms of RAM you should aim to max out your RAM if you can. I don't have much information on your computer specs so I can't give any more specific information about that.
You should have 10 to 15 percent of your internal HDD as free space. This gives your computer room for virtual memory to be most efficient.
Here is an article on maintenace that has good advice and links to resources: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=607640&#607640
In addition to repairing permissions, another simple procedure is to reset the PRAM. You should boot from your install disk and run Repair Disk from Disk Utility on the install disk. I run monthly diagnostics and repairs with Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior. In addition running regular CRON cleaning with a utility like MacJanitor, Cocktail, Macaroni or Onyx (all linked in the article above) keeps your machine running smoothly and minimizes the potential for major problems.
I think I have given you enough to chew on for now. Post back if you have further questions.
Good luck.
cornelius

External firewire drive constant spin-down/up

I often connect an external Lacie firewire drive to my MacBook Pro for regular time machine backups. When the drive is connected and I'm using my Mac, the drive is constantly spinning and in an 'awake' state.
The drive remains in this state for as long as the display is on. As soon as the display enters sleep mode the external drive spins down, remains in sleep mode for 30 seconds, then spins-up for 20 seconds, only to enter sleep mode again. This cycle continues endlessly causing excessive noise and needless wear and tear.
I've unchecked put hard disk to sleep when possible in the energy saver preferences although this hasn't helped.
Any ideas?

Try un-checking the drive sleep box.
What model is the drive? Is it bus-powered or does it have its own AC power supply brick? What does LaCie have to say?

Replaced failed hard drive - access is slow with spinning ball

Hi,
I recently replaced my failed hard drive and during the OS install, selected a backup from Time Machine.
All's well. My apps and docs are all there.
However, when I double click on the HD icon on the desktop, I get a spinning ball for about 3-5 seconds before I get a contents window.
Is there something I should NOT have copied over from Time Machine that has caused this behavior?
The new HD is a 7200 rpm(?) Western Digital Caviar, 1 TB. Details from System Profiler:
ST31000528AS:
Capacity: 1 TB (1,000,204,886,016 bytes)
Model: ST31000528AS
Revision: CC35
Serial Number: *****
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk1
Rotational Rate: 7200
Bay Name: Bay 1
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Main Drive:
Capacity: 999.86 GB (999,860,912,128 bytes)
Available: 539.26 GB (539,261,030,400 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2
Mount Point: /
Thank you for any help!
Greg
< Edited by Host >

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen. Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take one of the actions that you're having trouble with. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Firewire drive connected & sleep question

I have an external firewire drive on my eMac. I hardly ever shut the eMac down and the drive is not powered through the computer. Do drives of this type eventually spin down after a while of non-activity, or is the thing always spinning and running if it is on - even when not being used? if so, is it best that I only turn it on when I want to use it, and if that is not at computer boot up is that a problem. I have the drive to do iMovie and iDVD stuff, which is not an everyday occurrence.
thanks

My LaCie drive will "spin down" after a short while of not being used. I keep it unplugged when I don't need it. But it does not seem to be a problem to leave the drive connected 24-7 which I have done from time to time...everything works fine...computer sleeps...
DD

Firewire drives won't spin down when I put iMac to sleep

I have three external hard drives connected to my iMac in a FW800 daisy chain. It used to be, when I put my iMac to sleep, all three of the external drives would spin down and go quiet. I replaced the drive in the middle of the chain with a new one (both LaCie), and now none of the three external drives spin down when my I sleep my iMac.
Does anyone know how to get them to spin down?

It's a known issue for many many brands of FW800 drives. I've been reporting this to apple for a while. With 10.9.2, my particular drives will spin down if they are mounted and unmounted but if my system wakes from sleep which will spin up all drives, they stay that way until I mount and unmount again. So....10.9.2 is a little better but FW is still borked.
This is the primary reason my Mac Pro is still on Mountain LIon. My MBA is on mavericks. A note of caution...Mavericks writes to the NVRAM, sometimes when dual booting it is good to clear that memory.

My firewire drive isn't mounting. The port is fine and the drive powers up and spins. Help anyone?

Hi, thanks in advance. My firewire drive isn't mounting. I have used this firewire drive for a few years and it has never had any problems at all. The port appears in the System Profiler and the drive is working fine. Do I need to update my firmware or something? I haven't dropped my drive or experienced any weird physical issues with either the firewire port or the drive (ie shocks from static, getting kicked accidentally, etc).
Do you have any thoughts on how I can fix this issue? Its very critical, I have several client projects on this drive and will be SCREWED and out of a job soon if I can't get this situation solved. THANK YOU!!!

Another interesting issue, is that when the firewire (800) drive is connected, the system takes forever to boot (about 4 minutes). Without the firewire drive connected, it boots up automatically.
I suspect the long boot times is because the boot process is trying hard to get the disk checked and mounted which of doesn't happen when it is not connected.
Disk Utility doesn't see the drive at all.
Well that isn't good. This disk may be (physically) damaged beyond repair or the format so corrupt that even DU doesn't know what to do with it. But on the subject of firmware, you shouldn't need that for FW400/800 connections but what kind of enclosure are you using? If there is a firmware update at all it would be from the maker of that enclosure for that enclosure.
Is it possible to remove the drive from the enclosure and put it into your mac pro?

Stupid question: force booting from external FireWire drive

My PowerBook is refusing to boot from it's hard drive (flashing ?/folder), which I'll be attempting to repair using DiskWarrior, etc.
But it's also not finding and booting from the OS X installed on my external FireWire drive (which it could do under normal circumstances). How do I force it to do that given that I'm unable to set the Start Up Volume in the normal manner?
PowerBook G4 17" 1.5GHz 512MB 80GB Mac OS X (10.3.6)

Dale,
Thanks for your response. I've been through the usual stuff as in your reference and I eventually got it to boot off the external HD by just leaving it long enough - it took maybe 10-15 minutes. I'm booted from it now. I hadn't thought of using the Startup Manager, but will try to remember next time.
As for the internal HD, it's looking like it's dead - neither Disk Warrior nor Data Rescue II seem to be able to see it. I tried Disk Utility from the external HD, but it doesn't see it and nor does the Profiler. Maybe it's just a loose connection internally. There is a noise coming from the PB from about just under the division between the left hand rest and the speaker. It sort of sounds like a disk continually being read or written - ie. a sort of very rapid clicking, but I don't think it's the HD. And I don't think it's the fan. Anyone with any ideas before I call AppleCare?
I did have a very similar problem a few weeks ago (http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1465680#1465680), but Disk Warrior fixed it apparently with next to no problems. I was going to wipe the drive at the weekend & reinstall, but didn't get round to it in the end ... Fortunately I had a backup this time and was able to restore my user simply by copying it.

Firewire Drive hangups when starting recording

I was wondering if anybody has had any issues with their Firewire drives hanging with the beach ball spinning for as much as 20-30 seconds after record enabling a track and hitting the record transport button after upgrading to the new Studio version. (Never happened for me in 7.2)
The hard drive seems to function fine otherwise and disk utility doesn't see any issues.
It is intermittent and I can't seem to find the answer to this problem.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Thanks for all of the help - I have been out of town and just got back to testing. I will make sure that I turn the setting in Energy Saver off so that it does not put the hard disks to sleep. I cannot access the Journaling setting for some reason on the firewire drive, and unfortunately it is formatted as FAT-32, since I was using it with a pc also.
Does the FAT-32 system make it slower? Sorry for the added question.

Spinning Ball- Firewire Drive question?

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