MacBook Pro boots Leopard extremely slowly

[ChronoDog]

I've posted this already on the official Apple discussions, but something tells me I'll get a much better answer over here

 

Here's a copy of my post, thanks in advance for taking the time:

 

Hello everyone

 

Recently I've purchased a new MacBook Pro (non-Unibody, latest 15-inch Penryn 2.4ghz model), model number "MacBook Pro4,1".

It worked awesomely for about a week, but a couple of days ago I did something rather stupid and popped the battery out at almost the end of OSX's booting process because I needed to boot into XP and wasn't patient enough to reboot properly.

 

After I put the battery back in, it booted up almost till the OS X desktop, and then shut itself down all of a sudden. I turned it on again, could hear the drive spinning up and then it shut down abruptly again, I could hear the HDD's head parking. No chime, and nothing on the screen, it stayed black. I tried turning it on again a couple of times in the following two days, and always the same result - On for a few seconds with a black screen, then abrupt powerdown.

 

Needless to say I was in shock, was pretty much ready to jump out of the window. On the 3rd day I was on my way to Israel's Apple representative to drop it off at their lab, and decided to give it another shot. It turned on, and I booted into XP at first. I ran a few games, expecting it to die again, ran 3DMark (and got the exactly same score as before). Everything ran as good/bad as ever on XP, as if nothing happened. I rebooted and that's where it started.

 

Here's the list of what's wrong:

 

1) It takes it ridiculously long amounts of time to boot up into OS X. It stays for about 4 minutes on the beachball (is that what that spinning thing under the apple called?), then about 8 more minutes on the initial light blue screen (and it dims the screen during that time, too, after a few minutes. Un-dims again if I move the mouse), and only then boots up to the desktop.

 

2) Games/Movies run very slowly, the desktop/interface seems to be less affected.

 

3) It drains the battery under OS X in about an hour, idling. Used to stay idle for almost 8 hours previously. XP still drains it like it did before - about 3 hours of light usage, no change there.

 

4) The laptop gets extremely hot, so I assume that OS X doesn't utilize any of the power saving features. Again, under XP everything is (as) normal (as it can be on XP). CPU power saving features work, I can see its' speed dropping on idle.

 

5) Booting form the Leopard installation DVD takes about 20 minutes. The DVD spins down and idles numerous times during the process, as if the system is waiting for something to time out before resuming the loading process. Booting from it before the "battery incident" took less than three minutes.

 

6) System Profiler shows "Unable to list FireWire devices" under the FireWire category (previously showed "Up to 800mbit/s" there).

 

Things I've tried:

 

1) Reformatted and reinstalled OS X. Same results.

 

2) Ran Apple Diagnostics, both the short and the full tests. No problems found.

 

3) Tried updating the firmware to v1.5.1, but it said that this laptop didn't require it, since it only updates it up to MB31.xxxx.xxx and this laptop has the version at MB41.xxxx.xxx

 

4) Held down Cmd-Opt-P-R through 3 and 4 chimes. Didn't help either.

 

I'm at a loss here. I can't afford to stay without a computer for as long as it'd take our local Apple representatives to fix it (from what I've heard, 2 weeks are a best case scenario), and I've exhausted pretty much every option of fixing it that I could find/think of. I even smelled the laptop all over, but detected no traces of a smell of anything burnt.

 

So... any more ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks for taking the time to read this and thanks in advance

 

MacBook Pro 15-inch Mac OS X (10.5.5) Latest pre-unibody model, 2.4ghz Penryn 3mb cache

[Orea]

Sounds like you got a buggered HD to mee.

[ChronoDog]

That would really suck... strangely though, XP seems to not notice it at all

[RaiDesu]

Might not be the case- I've had XP ignore a whole bunch of hard drive issues, and optical media issues before.

[hecker]

I agree with the users above that it might be your drive.

Get yourself an app called Drive Genius. It will create a boot CD for you, which you can use to analyze the HDD without loading OSX.

 

PM me if you need more infos.