Last week my Macbook Pro start to get really slow... The week before I upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, then there was a Lion update and finally I've installed Microsoft Office for Mac.
Then, things started to get real slow...
And by real slow, I mean, 20 minutes to boot...
Since there were three major modification to the system on the same week.
I started by checking if it could be caused my the RAM upgrade. I've found that it was a possibility, but it would probably not be it, since it worked fine some days after the memory upgrade. Nevertheless, I changed to the original RAM, to see if it was it, and, as I expected, it was not.
Over the time, it became even more slow... At some point, it would not even boot and it started to heat...
That's when I decided to make a system recover.
Pressing ALT + CMD + P + R all at the same time until the apple logo comes up boots up the repair partition with the disk utilities and system repair options.
After a quick check with Disk Utility, which yield no problems whatsoever. Nevertheless, I performed a system repair.
It also took a lot of time but eventually it finished.
But the first boot did not happened... It got stuck and started to heat again...
I decided that it would probably require a clean installation.
I booted the repair options again, now also taking too long to load, formatted the partition and installed the Lion again.
But again, the boot failed!
It was time to get the Snow Leopard boot DVD that came with the computer.
Loading from the DVD, by pressing C during boot, was quite fast. Much faster than loading from the hard drive.
Now, that's quite unusual! And the repair system was running faster than the version from the hard drive.
By now I was thinking it could be I/O problems, and thus performed another disk verification and repair with Disk Utility. It came out OK. After performing a clean installation, also taking ages (the estimate time was 35 minutes and it took 2 hours), I was able to perform a boot into my fresh install Snow Leopard.
The boot was still slow and the Apple "Welcome" video was not synchronized with the audio, it had a lot of freezes and took too much time to play...
By now, I was convinced it was a hard disk problem.
Again, the Disk Utility stated that the hard drive was fine. I performed a simple test: open a Terminal. A simple and small application on a clean 8GB RAM system took around 30 seconds... And when I fired Safari, it took over a minute, with a maximum of 78kb/second of I/O speed...
After some research, I've found that the Disk Utility that Apple ships is a peace of crap. Simply stated: Disk Utility sucks. It is totally non-reliable.
I've also found out that slow systems are a good indicator of a dying hard drive.
And finally, I've found good software that didn't lie to me: SMART Utility.
As soon as I've opened SMART Utility, it stated a set of problems, including bad sectors and SMART failure.
That was it!
Disk Utility sucks.
If Apple packed a decent disk utility it would have saved me a lot of much time. And, thinking about it, how hard can it be to pack a decent disk utility nowadays?
Here's a good topic about all this:
./M6
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