[Toyin]

15" Aluminum PB with 1.5ghz G4. Now 2 years old.

Problems all started after upgrading to 10.4.4 after the Keynote (how convenient is that?) The machine seemed to really slow down and freeze. I did all my usual troubleshooting. I didn't do more than one repair at a time.

So far I've.
-Repaired Permissions
-Rebooted and ran fsck -fy
-Clean caches (light and heavy)
-Re-ran the 10.4.4 upgrade from the combo updater
-Created a new user

By now things are intermittently getting ridiculously slow (3 minutes to launch System preferences) so I back up my homefolder data and use Disk Warrior. DW finds a few directory errors and repairs them. Still no improvement.

So I boot from my External firewire drive with a cloned image from 10.4.2 and eveything is a back to normal speed. I try to repair the internal drive from there, but it reports everything is okay.

Reboot from the internal drive and still slow as molasses (about 20 minutes to get to a functional Finder). So I cloned my current hardrive to another firewire drive for another back up (I haven't had time to boot from this disk since it took all night to create the clone)

My questions:
I already have my 100gb 7200rpm Hitachi on the way (Yes I read all the Seagate vs Hitachi threads). Is there anyway this is an ATA bus problem not a hard drive problem? Is there anyway to test that? Any other suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks in advance.

[Dr.Michael]

Originally Posted by Toyin

15" Aluminum PB with 1.5ghz G4. Now 2 years old.

Problems all started after upgrading to 10.4.4 after the Keynote (how convenient is that?) The machine seemed to really slow down and freeze. I did all my usual troubleshooting. I didn't do more than one repair at a time.

So far I've.
-Repaired Permissions
-Rebooted and ran fsck -fy
-Clean caches (light and heavy)
-Re-ran the 10.4.4 upgrade from the combo updater
-Created a new user

By now things are intermittently getting ridiculously slow (3 minutes to launch System preferences) so I back up my homefolder data and use Disk Warrior. DW finds a few directory errors and repairs them. Still no improvement.

So I boot from my External firewire drive with a cloned image from 10.4.2 and eveything is a back to normal speed. I try to repair the internal drive from there, but it reports everything is okay.

Reboot from the internal drive and still slow as molasses (about 20 minutes to get to a functional Finder). So I cloned my current hardrive to another firewire drive for another back up (I haven't had time to boot from this disk since it took all night to create the clone)

My questions:
I already have my 100gb 7200rpm Hitachi on the way (Yes I read all the Seagate vs Hitachi threads). Is there anyway this is an ATA bus problem not a hard drive problem? Is there anyway to test that? Any other suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks in advance.

Start Activity Monitor and find out, if some automatically launched application kills your performance. Probably its the spotlight indexing that takes forever on a 100 GB drive.

You can switch that off in the spotlight system preferences.

[Toyin]

Originally Posted by Dr.Michael

Start Activity Monitor and find out, if some automatically launched application kills your performance. Probably its the spotlight indexing that takes forever on a 100 GB drive.

You can switch that off in the spotlight system preferences.

Sorry, I've got menu meters running and the CPU doesn't spike during these freezes. Also Terminal running Top and Activity monitor confirms this observation.

[Dr.Michael]

Originally Posted by Toyin

Sorry, I've got menu meters running and the CPU doesn't spike during these freezes. Also Terminal running Top and Activity monitor confirms this observation.

If spotlight would be the problem, it is not the cpu that slows down, its the disk activity. Did you check that too?

Network is also a good candidate when it comes to freezing a system. So I suggest to plug off all network connections (and switch off Airport). Remove external disks.

[Toyin]

Originally Posted by Dr.Michael

If spotlight would be the problem, it is not the cpu that slows down, its the disk activity. Did you check that too?

Network is also a good candidate when it comes to freezing a system. So I suggest to plug off all network connections (and switch off Airport). Remove external disks.

Definitely not spotlight, there's no indexing going on. Network issues also unlikely since I use the PB at the office and at home, and that wouldn't explain the unusually long boot time.

I booted off the external HD and tried to repair the internal drive again and get this

Verify and Repair disk “ PBG4”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Keys out of order
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Keys out of order
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Keys out of order
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Keys out of order
Keys out of order
volume %@ could not be repaired after 3 attempts.",1)

PBG4
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

Looks like it's a hardrive problem. I hope it's nothing more serious though.

[ibook_steve]

Try a clean install of 10.4, selecting the option to save your user name and preferences. Then run the combo update back to 10.4.4. If there are still problems, your hard drive could be taking a dive.

Steve

[Toyin]

Thanks for the replies, it definitely was the hard drive. I replaced it with a nice 100gb Hitachi and loving life. Opening up the 15" PB seemed a lot easier than working with the 12" PB. From start to finish took a little over 30 minutes.