inconsistent OSX failures after hard drive replacement

J

jconway

Registered
A few weeks ago my Macbook Pro hard drive started to fail and I replaced it. Since then I have had a handful of issues that seem to randomly occur after each boot.

For example, one time after cold boot, the grey screen (apple and gear) will hang forever. If I power cycle, the next boot might work fine, but when I log in DNS does not work. If I boot a third time, Finder fails to start, but DNS works fine. After a fourth attempt, everything works perfectly.

Note that this exact sequence is not predictable -- sometimes the grey screen hangs twice in a row. Sometimes everything works perfectly twice in a row. It seems very random.

I have tried:
1) boot from install DVD (Leopard) and run disk utility to fix permissions and repair the disk
2) upgrade to Snow Leopard, and repeat #1
3) run all updates to Snow Leopard and repeat #1
4) reinstall Snow Leopard and repeat #1

So far, if I am patient and boot enough times, I eventually get to a usable system, but obviously this is not ideal and somewhat disconcerting ;-)

Any ideas, suggestions, questions, etc would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Joe
 
How do you know if it was the drive failing in the first place? Do you have any known good RAM to test with?
 
I was seeing file access errors (not permissions but actual failing to read the files), so I am reasonably sure the drive was failing.

As an update, I have run the disk utility to fix permissions again, and although the problems are not gone entirely, they are much less frequent.

I also found that when I run into a boot up with DNS failures, I can "fix" it by running

launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Joe
 
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