[Scylla]

Hi all

Before I start, I'm aware that some long-term members of the forum appear to be very touchy about people apparently posting before searching. Well, I have searched, and haven't found the answer.

I've had a PowerBook for just over a week. Last night, it suddenly slowed down and I was unable to close down applications - I got the spinning beach ball, and had to hold down the start button to get it to shut down. Since then, it takes 20 minutes to boot to the desktop, and I'm unable to start any applications or even open the Finder - beach ball again.

I've tried booting from the install CD and repairing the drive. I've also tried to repair permissions, but it hangs halfway through (20 minutes later.)

If I reinstall the OS, will I end up with a clean disk? Or can I install so that it keeps all my apps. and settings? Got a lot of stuff installed - Final Cut Pro and Final Draft particularly - that I don't want to have to reinstall if I can help it.

FWIW, I had recently downloaded and installed some screensavers and Launch Bar in the same session as when it went all weird.

Any help gratefuly received - thanks in advance.

[JKT]

From what you describe it sounds like some process is hogging either the CPU or the memory or both - do you hear your hard drive going overtime? If so, it sounds like you are getting massive paging due to a rogue process. Alternatively, are your fans going full blast (which would indicate massive CPU usage). You need to stop that process from loading at start up so try the following:

If you don't auto-login, try holding down the shift key as you press the login button (and keep it held until the system has fully logged you in). This will stop any items in the Login items preferences from loading. If that solves the problem, delete the items you installed at the time things went wrong (and check your System Preferences>Accounts>Your username>Startup Items to make sure anything related to them has been deleted from this list).

If you auto-login or that doesn't work, try booting in safe mode (hold down the shift key as you restart and keep it held down). This will stop any third-party extensions to the system from loading. If that works, then some third party software is your problem. Again, delete the recently installed stuff.

If that doesn't work, you could try an archive and install - this re-installs the system but retains your home folder(s) and preferences and keeps a copy of the old system (renamed as Previous System) so that you can recover e.g any fonts you installed etc. You would probably have to reinstall some software such as FCP as it may have installed some frameworks into the system, but this would be a lot less painful than a full re-install.

[Maflynn]

I'd probably remove what you installed (physically look for the files in the library folder) and I'd run top in the terminal window. That will show you all of the processes running and cpu consumption of each process. Applications/utilities/Application Monitor does the same thing,you can use that if you don't like to work in the terminal.

There shouldn't be any reason for you to reinstall OSX but a clean install will fix it, but that is a drastic step and one I would avoid until all other options have been exhausted

Mike