Spinning beach ball, mouse tracks, screen turns to patches of lines

Spinning beach ball appears a lot, mouse leaves a wide track across screen when the computer wakes up, screen turns to lines across it, with desktop visible beneath. Really weird. Anyone have similar symptoms?

Hmmm all I can say is my windows shake without me touching anything and my trackerpad is already disabled!

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27 ", late 2010, iMac won't boot after turning on. Spinning beach ball and white screen.

Probably a relatively simple fix, or series of steps, that will return it to normal.

BD,
It's been a while, but I have since upgraded RAM to 12Gb and gone to Mavericks 10.9.4. Everything has run well until recently. Time Machine will not function on a new Seagate, 1TB GoFlex external HD,even though it was properly formatted and HFS journaled. Seagate techs said it seems to be a failing drive, yet it works perfectly on my laptop, a 15" MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion. The drive completes less than 10% of the backup before it locks everything up on the iMac with the spinning beach ball and a gray screen. Left it that way for two days and no change. Removed the drive physically and the iMac works just fine. I am baffled and really a bit frustrated here and wonder if you, or anyone else, has an idea about correcting this? I am suspecting that there is something deeper in the system going on than I am seeing.
I have run a verification of Disc Permissions/Repairs and keep getting this coming up: "Permissions differ on “Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Safari.help/Contents/Resources/inde x.html”; should be lrwxr-xr-x ; they are -rwxr-xr-x ."
That keeps coming up every time and is not fixed. I don't know if that has anything to do with that.
Baffled...

Spinning beach ball at login screen after upgrading to 10.4.8

Ok, I so used software update to install the 10.4.8 update (I know, big mistake, should have used combo update, etc.), and upon restart can't get past the login screen. After several seconds, the spinning beach ball appears and that's it. Been like that for hours.
Booted into single user mode and ran fsck, says that the volume is fine. diskutil stalls out in single user mode (can't place my hands on the install CD, otherwise I'd use diskutil fron that).
So, ideas?

I had this happen on my wife's iBook G4.. Here's what I did..
Remove the battery.. Unplug the power. Let it sit for a few seconds. (30 to be safe)..
Then plug it all back in
Turn it on and press APPLE-OPTION-P-R immediately after pressing the power button and hold it in for a LONG time.. even after you hear the chime.. keep holding it in for FOUR CHIMES and FOUR initialiations of the CD/DVD drive.
Then let go and let it boot.. you will then see the Apple Grey screen and it should boot normally.. Once it boots, repair permissions immediately.
At least that's what worked on her iBook, exact same problem.
Hope this helps.
Greg

Spinning beach ball and black screen on my new macbook pro

After great anticipation, I just updgraded to a new macbook pro from an ibook G4. For the most part, I am thrilled and applications open and web pages load quickly. Occassionally, though, I get spinning beach balls...with more frequency than I did with my ibook and in OS X native apps...such as Safari.
Another problem I am having is in Front Row playing movie trailers: the screen goes black before the end of the trailer, but the audio continues.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
macbook pro 2Ghz, ibook G4, imac G4, power mac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

That is the automatic ambient light sensor doing it's thing.
Depending on what machine you have, try turning the screen brightness all the way up. It will buttons on the top row, usually the F-1 for dimmer, F-2 for brighter
Also you can go to sytem preferences>display and un check the automatically adjust brightness for ambient light.
Hope this helps

Project won't load! Spinning beach ball at opening screen.

So my project is multi-camera, has all externally synced audio, and about 45 min of footage in current timeline. When I created the project, and edited the elements within, all worked fine. But now when I try to reopen the project, I get the spinning beach ball hanging at the opening screen for hours. It just shows "loading project into timeline" forever. It just doesn't want to open. Anyone run into these problems before??
Specs: 2010 mbp, 2.53 ghz i5, 8GB ram, 500GB. OSX 10.8.4

Hi Chris Lee 310,
I'm sorry to hear you are having issues with your Final Cut project.
The article below may be able to help you with this issue.
Click on the link below to see more details and screenshots.
I've quoted some helpful highlights for you:
Final Cut Pro X: Troubleshooting basics
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3893
7. Hide Events and Projects
You can isolate issues with events and projects by hiding your events and projects and then un-hiding a project or event. Do this one at a time until you are able to reproduce the issue and identify an affected event or project. For detailed information on hiding events and projects see
Final Cut Pro X: Hiding events and projects
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4740
I hope this information helps ....
Have a great day!
- Judy

Spinning beach ball of death when turning on wifi

Whenever I try turning on wifi via the wifi icon on the top dock, I get the beach ball of death for about 2-3 minutes. then everything just runs slow. I can do it much quicker from System Preferences. it's like what ever is happening with the icon is just hanging up.
Any thoughts?

No one has seen this?

Mavericks Screen Capture causes spinning beach ball

Trained by experience never to install a brand new operating system on top of a perfectly functioning one (unless I want to risk many wasting times and losing productivity), to test out the new Mac OS, I installed Mavericks on an external FireWire drive by upgrading a fresh install of Snow Leopard, updated to its maximum version. Nothing else was on the volume, for I had used Disk Utility to securely erase and content and overwrite the volume with zeros.
Immediately after the Mavericks, I looked at the System Profile, taking some screen captures of selected windows. While Mavericks successfully captured the screens, it failed to display them when I selected one and hit the space bar. Instead, mavericks presented a perpetually spinning beach ball that prevented me from doing anything else on the Mac. I was forced to shut down.
Upon restart back into Mavericks, I encountered the same problem. I had to force power off again.
After rebooting into Mountain Lion on my internal hard drive, I ran a complete series of hard drive maintenance utilities involving all the tools I have, including Disk Utility, Drive Genius, Disk Warrior, and Tech Tool Pro. All ran successfully and reported no problems. I then capped things by running iDefrag to eliminate file fragmentation and to optimize the volume. With several hours of labor invested in preparing the external hard disk, downloading Mavericks' installer, running the Mavericks installer, performing all the pertinent maintenance routines I could think of, and finally optimizing the volume, which has no other software on it besides the new Apple operating system, I restarted the Mavericks volume. I then took a fresh screen capture, selected it, pressed the space bar, and I still got that infernal spinning beach ball.
I let it run for at least half an hour as I returned to watching a football game, hoping things would finally get cleared up. They did not. The ball still spun. I could not even get to the Finder to peek into the Force Quit command under the Apple icon. So, as originally condemned, I was compelled to hold down the power button to regain control of my computer, which this new, appropriately named operating system had wrested from me.
Anyone having a similar problem? Anyone aware of a sure-fire solution, other than to avoid relying on this new operating system, which must be my policy until such glitches get fixed?
At least you know now why I consider it unwise to install a brand new OS atop of one that has served you well.

OK, it’s Wednesday now, late afternoon, following a long yesterday, spent exclusively on getting Mavericks installed, a day which continued well into night, approaching the sun rise, until I collapsed. No one can tell me that the Mavericks installation is without errors! Your mileage may differ, if you’re lucky. But if you had to go through what I just did, you’ll long for the days of System 7, when all you had to do was shove a half-dozen floppy disks into a floppy drive to get your Mac up and running without such angst.
SHORT ANSWER:
After many twists and turns that Apple should have foreseen and not inflicted upon customers, I finally managed to get Mavericks installed on my external Firewire hard drive.
I did follow your lead, Baltwo, that the nature of the problem might lay in corrupt preferences files on the primary Account, but, as I attempted a couple of days, I modified your suggestion that I cherry-pick which plist files might be good vs. which might be corrupt, by deleting the whole **** account. A couple of days ago, my intuition told me that doing that was the wiser way to proceed; today I felt compelled to do exactly that, because I had no other choice.
The reasons I had to do that is elaborated upon below.
LONGER EXPLANATION and DETAILS:
As I explained in the message I composed on Tuesday morning, I felt so insecure that I did not obtain a well-functioning operating system that I had decided to start the installation all over from scratch.
It took all day Monday to again use Disk Utility to securely erase the volume and prepare it for the new installation. When I tried to short-cut the process by doing a Quick Erase, the volume refused to accept the installation of Snow Leopard 10.6.3 from the DVD. On top of that, I again encountered difficulties in installing Snow Leopard from the DVD, because the installer just could not close the deal. The gauge runs up to the 99% mark, and it hangs there saying that it is “Moving items into place.” Sure, it is!
I’m a patient guy, so I let the installer do its thing for about four hours while I watched the World Series game. (Yeah, Red Sox!) But by the time the game was over, so was my patience. I had to Force Power Off the Mac and restart it.
Since I have no confidence in an operating system whose installer failed to do its job properly, I felt that I had to do more. Before I did that, though, I did a Google search to find out if my experience was unique. It is not! The forums are full of people who have complained about this very same hanging problem ever since the Snow Leopard DVD was released. Great, I thought. Now what do I do?
I decided to the Apple support site and download the 1.x GB combo updater to Snow Leopard 10.6.8 in the hopes that the upgrade process would cure whatever issues cropped up during the incomplete installation by the DVD. After downloading that combo disk image, installing 10.6.8, restarting the Mac under 10.6.8, and getting all the software updates applicable to that version, a few tests, supplemented by a running a whole barrage of maintenance utilizes to fix permissions, repair the disk, rebuilt the directory, seemed to indicate that I did finally achieve a solid installation of Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and all its trimming.
To save myself any future agony of having to go through this kind of winding road installation again, I used SuperDuper to create a disk image of the entire volume. That disk image is stored on another Firewire volume, ready to burned at some future date onto a BluRay disc for safe-keeping and backup.
With Snow Leopard safely installed on the volume and sporting one user Account, I was ready to use the Mavericks installer package that I had downloaded last Saturday, when I first began this process, to upgrade to Apple’s latest and greatest OS. Unfortunately, the installation process failed in the same way that the Snow Leopard installer failed. The installer just could not get over the hump of closing the deal. Once I got the installer started, I went to bed.
Four hours later, the installer still had not completed its job, again getting to the 99% mark, and just hanging there. Again, I had to Power Off the Mac. Upon restarting with the Option held down, I elected to start up using the built-in Recovery feature.
That seemed to work, but only sort of. I was able to get a Mavericks desktop, but the User account had absolutely no privileges to do a **** thing. It could not open its own Home folder to see what was in it. It could not complete the screen capture process, because I had no permission to save the picture anywhere, like on the Desktop.
In System Preferences, I tried to increase the size of the cursor, but that failed. In Finder preferences, I tried to make the hard drives show up on the desktop, but that failed, too. I ran permissions in Disk Utility; that did no good. Nothing worked! I could not even change anything related to my User account, because I had no permission to do so. Imagine that: my only account was an Administer account to which I had no access. I would not have thought such a thing could be possible.
I was caught in a loop, stranded on a Mobius Strip, walking on the wild side, surfing the waves of a brand new operating system corrupted by its own installation process.
Not a good thing at all.
Since the first installment had also resulted in a bizarre set of user accounts ending up with QuickLooks being declared the winner of a new account the system decided to create for me, I think it is reasonably safe to conclude that there is some kind of a bug, or flaw, in the Apple upgrade / installation procedure that needs some attention by Apple system engineers. None of this kind of stuff I have delineated at some length should be happening to anyone who owns a Mac.
And, Baltwo, even though I had kept uppermost in my mind your suggestion about creating a new account merely to ferret out which preference files might be corrupt and which might be OK, I decided that I did not want to take any chances at all with this extremely messed User account, which had worked fine in Snow Leopard, but had somehow got corrupted during the upgrade. So, as before, I decided to (1) create a brand new Administrator account; (2) log out from the useless User account in which I had no privileges whatsoever; (3) log in with the brand new Adminstrator; and (4) delete that useless User account entirely, completely, and forever.
At first, I was a little hesitant about deleting the first Administrator account that existed in my Users and Groups pane. I did not even know if such a thing could be done. So, I referred to my David Pogue reference books, and I did a Google search for “Delete Home User Mac” to see what others knew about this. Everyone described the standard way to delete an account; no one even mentioned any prohibition about deleting the original User account. So, I went ahead and deleted it, without encountering the slightest problem in doing so. I even followed up with before and after Terminal commands to see if that useless User account was truly gone, and it definitely went poof. Since I lacked permissions to create any documents at all within that former Home folder, getting rid of it was easy. I think that the System was just as glad to trash it as I was.
Hopefully, whatever corruption occurred during the Mavericks installation and upgrade process was restricted to the preference files associated with that messed-up, original Administrator account so that I can begin exploring Mavericks with a perfectly pristine operating system. Before I start tweaking it or adding stuff to it, my next step will be to use SuperDuper to create a disk image of the entire volume, so that, in the future, I will have a clean set of system of file to install on this external Firewire volume, or on any other internal hard drive I choose to install Mavericks later on. A Bluray disc will contain that disc image for safekeeping when it’s time to remove it from the destination volume where it gets created.
As to the tardiness of my reply, it is caused by the exorbitant amount of time—four days!—it took me to trek along this twisting, winding path of installing Mavericks, as well as a glitch in the mismatch of similarly looking User Names associated with similarly looking Apple ID accounts and similarly looking User Names associated with nearly identical Email Addresses that do not convert from one to the other, as, for example, mac.com does to me.com.
As I learned from Apple Staff who responded to my report that I was being locked out of the Apple Discussions community, there are four pieces of information that must match up for each Apple ID account, and my data had slipped out of sync. Now I know why, during Apple’s changeover in the formatting of the Apple Discussions section, I lost all those “points” I had accumulated in helping others, not that I track such things, and I could not find where my previous discussions were.
That’s also why I may be able to award anyone points for helping me in this thread, but I’m dialing in under the “other” Apple ID, not the one I used to create this topic. Close readers will observe the slight difference.
Thanks a lot, Baltwo. You get the credit for pointing me in the right direction.

I accidentally quit my CC on my Macbook pro and now the cloud icon is grayed out and every time I hover over it with the mouse I get the spinning beach ball of death on the icon. I have no idea how to open it because when I use spotlight search to open it

I accidentally quit my CC on my Macbook pro and now the cloud icon is grayed out and every time I hover over it with the mouse I get the spinning beach ball of death on the icon. I have no idea how to open it because when I use spotlight search to open it it gives me a message saying "Creative Cloud is not open anymore" help!

Since you didn't include any pertinent info such as the Mac model and OS version you are running, here is some general information:
Mac OS X: Gray screen appears during startup
Depending on which OS yours came with originally - and which OS you are now running - you would either need your original install disks - you can call Apple for replacements by giving them your serial number. Or you may be able to reinstall the OS by using recovery (again, depends on which model/which OS).

I am having trouble with a LaCie 526 monitor working with my new Mac Pro. When I boot up, I see the sign-in screen for a second, then it disappears, reappears with some of the screen pixelated and the spinning beach ball -- and then freezes. Any thoughts

The LaCie is connected via DVI to thunderbolt adapter. It had been working, and then when I switched off the computer and restarted several days later, I see the signon screen flash quickly, followed by nothing, followed by the signon screen and spinning beach ball and it simply freezes. Any thoughts?

When you have kernel panics, the pertinent information is in the panic report.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
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 and start typing the name.
In the Console window, select
DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION ▹ System Diagnostic Reports
(not Diagnostic and Usage Messages) from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
There is a disclosure triangle to the left of the list item. If the triangle is pointing to the right, click it so that it points down. You'll see a list of reports. A panic report has a name that begins with "Kernel" and ends in ".panic". Select the most recent one. The contents of the report will appear on the right. Use copy and paste to post the entire contents—the text, not a screenshot.
If you don't see any reports listed, but you know there was a panic, you may have chosen Diagnostic and Usage Messages from the log list. Choose DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION instead.
In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)
Please don’t post other kinds of diagnostic report.
I know the report is long, maybe several hundred lines. Please post all of it anyway.

Spinning Beach Ball on almost every mouse click

I have a late 2009 21.5 imac 8 GB Ram running OS X 10.8.3
Everything was working fine until I the other day when it froze while being woken up from sleep mode.
I then got the white screen of death on every startup. Safe mode worked though.
I finally reinstalled Mountain Lion and startup worked again.
Now my problem is I get the spinning beach ball of death all the time and it lasts for several minutes.
It seems to happen on all applications at random. Chrome, mail, app store, finder etc...
I have activity monitor running and it never goes above 5-10%
Any suggestions on what to do to find what is causing the problem?

So I created a new user account, and so far everything is working as though my mac were brand new!
So can anyone tell me the best way to go about transferring files from the old "corrupted" user account to the new one?

Spinning beach ball when waking up from screen saver or sleep

A few months ago, my ancient (Quicksilver G4) Mac started giving me a spinning beach ball for a few seconds every time I wake it up from sleep or from the screen saver. It lasts anywhere from about 5 to 20 seconds. It never used to do this. The problem has continued despite a recent upgrade form 10.3.9 to 10.4.10. Repairing permissions and resetting PRAM hasn't helped. Any ideas?

Well... I tried many of those things in the search results, and nothing changed initially... i.e. after changing desktop backgrounds (which is all it seemed to take on my mini), and then changing passwords, I continued to not be prompted for my password until I restarted. Logging out might've worked as well, but I just went gung ho and went right for the restart.

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.
Any ideas?
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

Spinning Beach Ball when turning off Airport WiFi. SL Issues, many! Help!

I performed a clean installation of Snow Leopard on my new 13 inch late 2009 MBP on release date. All of a sudden, I am getting the infamous spinning beach ball when attempting to disable my Airport wifi. It's so bad, that I am not able to gracefully restart my system. Seriously this is getting out of hand. Snow Leopard was supposed to make Leopard even more stable.
Steps I have taken, not in any particular order.
Verified and repaired permissions.
Ran HW test, no issues found
Reset PRAM
Deleted wifi related plist files from /lib/prefs/sysconfig and rebooted;
The only thing I can think of next is to perform and Archive and Install or....
...As much as I would hate to go back, Install Leopard.
I would appreciate feedback or suggestions as what to do. Looks like 10.6.1 may be worth waiting for. Oh how I miss Tiger.

HI,
If you use an Airport Base Station or Airport Express, try resetting.
If that doesn't help...
Boot from the 10.6 disk and verify the startup disk for errors.
Insert Installer disk and Restart, holding down the "C" key until grey Apple appears.
Go to Installer menu (Panther and earlier) or Utilities menu (Tiger and later) and launch Disk Utility.
Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in the left panel.
Select First Aid in the Main panel.
(Check S.M.A.R.T Status of HDD at the bottom of right panel. It should say: Verified)
Click Repair Disk on the bottom right.
If DU reports disk does not need repairs quit DU and restart.
If DU reports errors Repair again and again until DU reports disk is repaired.
When you are finished with DU, from the Menu Bar, select Utilities/Startup Manager.
Select your start up disk and click Restart
Check available disk space.
Control or right click the MacintoshHD icon on your Desktop. Click "Get Info". Under the General tab you will see Capacity and Available. Make sure there is at least 10% available disk space, 15% is better.
If necessary, do an Archive an Install. It's the only install option available for Snow Leopard.
Carolyn

Power Mac G4 MDD 1.25GHz DP often completely locks up in the first few minutes after booting, sometimes with the spinning beach ball, normally with a very high pitched whining noise.

Over the last few months my Mac has developed a worrying habit.
Within the first few minutes of starting it up (perhaps on average about 50% of the time) it will completely lock up. This may happen at the Log In screen (if I start up the Mac & then leave it for a while) or during normal use.
Often the first symptom is a very high pitched (but quiet) whining noise that seems to come from the loud speaker on the front of the Mac. The pointer may freeze at this point, or it may still be moveable for 5 or 10 seconds before it freezes. It sometimes turns into the spinning beach ball during this. Once locked up the only way I can restart the Mac is to hold down the power button on the front for a few seconds to completely reboot the machine.
Once the Mac has restarted, it usually behaves normally, almost always for the rest of the day. The initial lock up & resulting restart only normally seem to happen the first time I use the Mac that day.
The only peripherals attached to the Mac (apart from the display, keyboard & mouse) are an ADSL modem, a USB printer and a pair of Apple Pro speakers, and this setup hasn't changed since long before the problems started, so I'm confident that I can discount the peripherals causing problems. I doubt that unplugging the speakers, for example, would have any effect.
I've run Disc Utility, OnyX and DiscWarrior without anything major cropping up. My instincts (I've been troubleshooting Mac problems for 16 years) tell me that I have a fundamental hardware problem, possibly with one of the 4 RAM DIMMs installed.
The RAM configuration is shown in the attached screen grab.
I'm considering removing one DIMM, running with 1.5GB of RAM rather than 2GB for a while, and repeating with a different DIMM removed each time until I can hopefully isolate the dodgy DIMM.
Do people feel this is a sensible approach, or should I try something else first?
Many thanks.

Sometimes visual inpection will show bulging tops/sides., my guess is if it is it's most likely in the PSU.
Possible cheap fix, You can convert an ATX PSU for use on a G4...
http://atxg4.com/mdd.html
http://atxg4.com/

Beach ball on black screen when waking Mini from sleep

I am looking for a way to fix this frequent problem. About 25% of the time I wake this 2-year-old Mac Mini from sleep, it will show a spinning beach ball or a regular pointer on a totally black screen. The monitor connected is an Acer, by the way, and it's had multiple color calibrations done to it... Anyways, the pointer or beach ball doesn't go away if you just let it sit awhile, but it does move with mouse motion. So the only ways of getting to the login screen from there are:
hold down the power button on the computer for 10 seconds, then start it up as usual.
unplug the HDMI cord that connects to the display from the back of the computer.
What does not work:
unplug the HDMI from the back of the display
turn the monitor off and on
unplug and replug the monitor
pressing keyboard shortcuts to shutdown, reboot, sleep, etc. don't work.
So from this I've deduced that it has something to do with the Mac Mini recognizing the Acer display and having to refresh that port's connection.
What I've already tried that has not permanently fixed the problem:
Reset the PRAM
Having frequent power outages counts as resetting the SMC, right?
restarting the computer (duh)
Doing the Apple Diagnostic test
Had Disk Utility test the hard drive (well ok its an ssd) and found no problems with it.
Help! It's not so much a problem for me but one other person who uses this computer is computer illiterate and cannot do a hard reset or figure out which cable goes where. And please, please, please do not take the easy way out and tell me to reinstall OSX (it's mavericks by the way). Thank you very much.

Humm... May have something to do with the straight HDMI connection, others have also complained about similar problems using a straight HDMI connection.
1. You tried a different HDMI cable...? (you didn't say)
2. What model is your Acer and what other inputs (DVI, VGA, etc.) does it support...?
I run dual DVI Samsung monitors on my Mac Mini and have not experience any problems. One is on the Apple Supplied HDMI to DVI adapter and the other in on a Kanex Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter.
No a power outage does not equal an SMC reset. If fact, it can have just the opposite effect and throw the System Management Controller off kilter.

Spinning beach ball, mouse tracks, screen turns to patches of lines

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