Questions:
(1) What would cause the disk to pulse every second or so, if the Disk Activity pane in the Activity Monitor shows no disk activity and the System Memory pane shows no page outs?
(2) Any suggestions on what I should try next, short of re-installing the OS?
(3) If I end up having to do a from-scratch install of the OS, what's the best way to restore the user accounts/settings?
Background / Details:
My wife started experiencing really sluggish behavior on her 12" PowerBook running 10.4. So, I made sure all is updated and repaired permissions. Then it wouldn't even boot... just hung on the gray boot screen. Tried a few reboots, including holding down the power button until it gave me the long tone. Still no boot. So, I pulled out my trusty ol' Disk Warrior CD and booted off that... unfortunately, its too old and could not rebuild the desktop on that disk. So, then I rebooted again, and it came up... seemingly fine.
Sooo, I left Activity Monitor up and told her to get me the next time it slowed up. That evening, while I was standing there, she switched between Firefox and Mail and said, "There it goes." The machine got real sluggish... including Activity Monitor. The drive was pulsing every second or so... real short accesses. Lots of color wheels showing in Activity Monitor. It showed the Firefox process as not responding very often. But still very little CPU usage, no page outs, and no disk activity! Yes, I could hear what sounded like the disk being accessed... even though there seems to be no accesses.
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