Mac OS X forum: everything crawls

Hmmmmm. That's what I thought. (note past tense)

I thought I'd try making a new backup with SuperDuper! using the offending MacBook in firewire target disk mode attached to another MacBook Pro that is running perfectly. I set it up, and set SuperDuper! to the task, and after an hour it had done hardly anything, and had copied about 800 MB of the 122 Gb on the drive.

So I pulled the plug on that process.

I have a small bus-powered hard drive I set up a while back as an emergency recovery disk. So I booted up the bad MacBook from that hard drive, which is also a 10.6.8 installation. The finder seems normally responsive, but it appears that anything having to do with disk operations involving the MacBook's internal drive is molasses-powered. I've set SuperDuper! to the task of completing the backup via smart backup, and it has also been running at a slow pace suggesting that the chore is going to take about 48 hours. Another hour-and-a-half of run-time, and I've managed to get all of 3.02 Gb backed up.

I did run Disk Utility on that drive before firing SuperDuper! up again, and it found and repaired couple missing files. I then ran it again for a clean report.

If I can manage to get a good backup this time, and assuming it finishes while I'm still young enough to care, I will try a clean reinstall of the OS.

Are you using Disk Utility to Repair Permissions or to Repair the disk?

You never did mention how the Macbook behaves after a clean install but without anything added to it


P

I used Disk utility to repair the disk. Permissions have also been repaired. If I could get the cloned disk built, I'd try that. I do have a cloned disk from my other MacBook Pro (a two years older machine, so might not work at all) I think I'll try to boot from to check the bad HD theory. Which is where I'm leaning, too.

Disk Utility and Disk Warrior both report S.M.A.R.T. functioning normally. But boot up is incredibly slow, too, except from other devices. Interestingly, the CD/DVD drive does not work, either. It spins, rattles and carries on for a bit, then spits out the disk (and I've tried several known-good disks), so it might also be the ATA controller.

Well, boys and girls, I think I found the problem. The clue was that the optical drive wasn't happy either.

So I popped the bottom off the machine . . . and after doing some prying to get it loose . . . I found that someone had spilled a coke in it. The bottom was stuck on with coke-glue, but it came off with a thuck sound, and it appears that the optical drive got drenched, and a little sloshed around under the battery and a few drops made it as far as the hard drive. But they don't appear to have done more to that than leave drops on the side opposite the circuit board.

So I took pictures, removed the drive, and put it into an enclosure and it appears to be reading fine, doing a SuperDuper! backup to disk image on another computer. My guess is that besides the optical drive's guts, the controller is screwed up.