Mac Mini hanging a few minutes after logon
Hello, so I have this customer's Mac Mini which just hangs 4-5 minutes after logon.
The dreaded Apple coloured pin wheel starts rotating and the system becomes unresponsive.
I can click here and there, but nothing happens although part of the interface still looks "alive".
Top menus mostly respond to mouse clicks, but nothing happens, not even if I try to shut down the machine.
So I'm no Mac expert, I fix hundreds of Windows PCs each year and I'm a Linux lover, but I rarely dabble with Apple stuff.
I booted to the hardware test utility, did the full test but it found no problems.
So I was wondering, what would be the best course of action here? I googled this quite a lot but found nothing conclusive, except for a lot of people with the same problem saying they never fixed it.
Maybe rolling back to an older version of OSX can help?
It's a Mac Mini version 6,2 (late 2012).
The OSX version is 10.9.5 (Mavericks).
The dreaded Apple coloured pin wheel starts rotating and the system becomes unresponsive.
I can click here and there, but nothing happens although part of the interface still looks "alive".
Top menus mostly respond to mouse clicks, but nothing happens, not even if I try to shut down the machine.
So I'm no Mac expert, I fix hundreds of Windows PCs each year and I'm a Linux lover, but I rarely dabble with Apple stuff.
I booted to the hardware test utility, did the full test but it found no problems.
So I was wondering, what would be the best course of action here? I googled this quite a lot but found nothing conclusive, except for a lot of people with the same problem saying they never fixed it.
Maybe rolling back to an older version of OSX can help?
It's a Mac Mini version 6,2 (late 2012).
The OSX version is 10.9.5 (Mavericks).
strung
Open Activity Monitor (found in /Applications/Utilities). Click on one of the column headings to sort the list by %CPU. See what process is hogging the CPU when the spinning ball comes up. Report back here with the information.
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ASKER
Thanks for the webpage link. I downloaded the smart utility and it looks like the hard drive has thousands of damaged sectors. Amazingly, I managed to finish a Time Machine backup anyway.
So now I'm waiting for the new drive.
I'll need to reinstall OSX. The Time Machine backup should recover everything, including installed apps right?
So now I'm waiting for the new drive.
I'll need to reinstall OSX. The Time Machine backup should recover everything, including installed apps right?
Yes, TIme machine should recover everything that was backed up to it.
ASKER
Substituting the hard drive and recovering the Time Machine backup fixed everything, after some small additional troubleshooting.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot.
ASKER
It was the hard drive. The deed is done.