OS X Freezing and Start Up Problems - PLEASE HELP

[LiquidFuse]

At times I will experience a computer freeze, the mouse can move but everything else is frozen. I have to turn the computer off manually after I try turning it on again I get the gray screen with the turning wheel, not the spinning beachball of death.

Then I have to turn it on and off till I finally get it to load, I am afraid that at some point it will just not come back on, this has been problematic for the last month. It seems to get worse. I usually will wait a long time for the computer to start up and it doesnt, still in the gray screen and then I will restart it and it loads ok.

I will run Disk Utility and fix the computer, but I eventually get the same problem. What can I do to fix this problem?

PLEASE HELP!

[Pengu]

try booting from the osx install disc and repairing permissions on your hard drive.

[lilliedugg]

Try downloading a utility called Cocktail from this site ; http://www.macosxcocktail.com/
It´s a very useful utility and could be what you need :


Geir

[bobw]

LiquidFuse

you should provide more information when asking for help.

Machine model
OS Version
Amount of memory
What you're doing when the problem occurs.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

That "gray screen with the turning wheel" you describe is the portion of the startup process where your startup disk integrity is checked and should not be interrupted. If you really have interrupted this process many times, you may have caused significant damage to the system install.

Reboot, and let it sit at the grey screen until it completes. It may take some time, perhaps 20 minutes or more, maybe even an hour or more, depending on how damaged the hard drive is.

For future reference, "pulling the plug" or doing a hard-reset should be avoided at all costs. UNIX/Mac OS X is VERY picky about shutdown processes, and doing a hard shutdown bypasses these checks and can damage the system install.

I would follow Pengu's suggestion, except you should be doing a "Repair Disk" while booted from the CD, not a "Repair Permissions." Repairing the permissions can be done safely while booted from the hard drive and is actually recommended that it be done that way. Repairing permissions, however, does not repair damage to the system, which I am almost positive you have since you've interrupted the repair process many times.

After everything is up and running again (after the repair has completed, either by letting the grey screen run to completion or booting from the CD and repairing the disk), then repair permissions to make sure that everything's in good, working order.

For an analogy, think of your OS X box like a car -- you wouldn't sit in the car with the key in the ignition, turning it on, then immediately off, then on again, then off again, then on again -- you're bound to screw the engine up if you did that. Same applies to the computer. If there's something wrong, turning it off and on and off and on and off and on over and over is bound to damage the system. If you suspect something is wrong, repair the drive by booting from the CD and then proceed troubleshooting from there. OS X, much like your car, will not magically heal itself -- if there's a problem, then more than likely one of us here can help you get it straightened out if you come here early enough in the problematic stages. If you let the problem go and keep shutting down and restarting a bunch, you may end up with an unrepairable system, forcing you to reinstall everything.

[scruffy]

If you haven't done so, make sure that journalling is turned on on all your HD partitions - this can reduce the damage considerably from a hard shutdown. It's far from being perfect, but it can help.

[DeltaMac]

AKAIK, journaling provides no advantage on other partitions or drives outside of the boot partition.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Journaling provides the most benefit to the boot drive, because the structure and layout of the boot drive as well as the files changes much more frequently than secondary hard drives. It is still beneficial to turn it on for external and secondary drives, simply because if your machine crashes in the middle of a write operation to one of those secondary drives, there's less of a chance of drive corruption, since the journal on that drive can help return the drive to a previously known good state.

In other words, if the directory of the drive is being changed, like during a write operation, and it is unexpectedly interrupted, the journal on the drive can help to correct the directory, preventing data corruption/loss.

It's just more "active" on the boot drive because of the frequency of writes to the boot drive.