[ricacu]

The past two weeks have been a nightmare with my C2D 2.0 Ghz Black Macbook.

First i experience a wave of beachballs every now and then, i ignored it but it got worse and worse. One day it froze and had to force the shut down, BAM, it doesnt boot, it only got to the grey screen with the apple logo and stayed there for ages. Ok, so i told my self "EFF IT" and reformated and did a clean install with the Leopard DVD which worked and loaded 5.1 without problems. I downloaded the updates (5.1.3, and i know it has given problems to alot of people), it installed and asked for a reboot, once again, the great grey apple screen that loads forever. Reformated again, clean install, stayed in 5.1 and after 2 days MORE BEACHBALLS! every time i use onyx it tells me to fix the disk with disk utility which i did alot of times, it didnt work, permissions, didnt work either. I reformated once again, and it worked ok for anoter 2 days, then more beachballs and executing iTunes and other programas froze the machine, didnt let me force shut down the apps. I decided to reformat once again and try updating to 5.1.3 manually, didnt work it stays in the blue screen at the start, not loading anything.


Sorry for the long story, i tought it was a dead HD and ordered a new one. Are these symptons related to HD ? constant beachballs, constant freezing (even after a clean re-install), blue screens, grey screens?

Thanks for your help.

[Sherman Homan]

Certainly sounds like a dying hard drive, although I am a little surprised that reformatting and installing the system seems to work. That model had a firmware update that was very important.

[ricacu]

Thanks for the reply,

I found it strange too that it worked after reformating, well it didnt exactly worked perfectly, after a couple of days it started to froze and receive loads of beachballs. It didnt let me update to 10.5.3 tho. But, getting system stalls/freeze after opening apps AFTER a clean full reformat/install? Thats gotta be the hard drive, well once again, i hope so.

I got a WD 250 gb drive and a 2 gb memory chip.

[Cold Warrior]

If your HD has bad sectors and your system doesn't know it, then it'll write to those sectors anyway. Then when it tries to read from them -- still not knowing they're bad -- weird stuff starts to happen. Freezes, crashes, and files/system corruption.

[ricacu]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

If your HD has bad sectors and your system doesn't know it, then it'll write to those sectors anyway. Then when it tries to read from them -- still not knowing they're bad -- weird stuff starts to happen. Freezes, crashes, and files/system corruption.

That makes sense, what buggered me was exactly that, i tought the hd was dead still it installed and worked perfectly for some days.

Thanks for the help, ill let you know as soon as i install the new drive. I hope Apple gets 10.5.4 out by that time.

[ricacu]

I replaced Hard Drive, clean-installed os x and ran the updates.

The update went trough perfect in just one try.
No problems so far
No beachballs so far

I guess the hard drives that came with the C2D 2.0 Ghz Blackbook where not that good.