stuckinstandby Posted September 5, 2018 Share Posted September 5, 2018 Hello My wife's early 2009 Snow Leopard iMac has started failing to boot properly and I'm looking for some troubleshooting tips. Booting from cold, it gets past the logon screen and starts loading the desktop. It's quite slow at this point, but does load all the (hundreds of!) icons on the desktop. It also tries to re-open Firefox which had a lot of tabs open. Initially it would load a Firefox window but not complete loading the internals. On one boot I think I managed to close Firefox and now it still tries to load but just displays "Firefox" in the title bar with no windows. I can initially access a few menus, spotlight, Finder, the dock, but any further action results in a beach ball for these, and they can't be accessed again. I was able to navigate Finder to try to launch Terminal but just it just gave me the beach ball. I've left it like this for about half an hour but it doesn't get any further and I have to force shutdown (long press of power button). I tried booting to safe mode (holding down S on startup) but the end result was the same. I've been able to boot to a live ubuntu USB disk and can access files on the hard disk, so I've started a backup. We have a time machine backup but it's not that recent. I'm hoping it's just a corrupt file, but suspect it's the hard disk starting to fail. What's the best way to troubleshoot this? Thanks Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/335411-beachball-when-trying-to-load-desktop/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allan Posted September 5, 2018 Share Posted September 5, 2018 6 hours ago, stuckinstandby said: but suspect it's the hard disk starting to fail. +1 Try boot the macOS with the recovery partition, and check the HDD with DU. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/335411-beachball-when-trying-to-load-desktop/#findComment-2633502 Share on other sites More sharing options...
LouCioccio Posted September 5, 2018 Share Posted September 5, 2018 (edited) In disk utility while in restore run first aid another utility is tech tools see if their is a SMART failure my assumptions it’s the hard drive is going south its easy to remove and install a SSD hard drive if the drive you remove has an apple logo see if has thermal sensor couple attach to it; probably not you’ll need one from OWC to connect to the SATA connector as apple used the internal from SMART lou cioccio Edited September 5, 2018 by LouCioccio Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/335411-beachball-when-trying-to-load-desktop/#findComment-2633527 Share on other sites More sharing options...
stuckinstandby Posted September 6, 2018 Author Share Posted September 6, 2018 Thanks. I managed to fix the problem last night. It's a weird one - it turns out that there's some issue related to IPv6. I swapped to a new router over a week ago and because I don't use this mac I didn't realise this issue was related. I found a thread on my ISP's forum: Sagemcom 2704N causing MacBook to crash As a test, I turned the router off and the mac started fine. For now I've just disabled wifi on the mac and it's working. The post just says to disable IPv6. I'm not sure whether that's: disable it on the router or disable it is OS X, but I think I'll change to an ethernet cable anyway. Probably a wake-up call to test the disk, get backups updated and maybe upgrade the disk anyway - SSD would be a big improvement. Thanks for your help. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/335411-beachball-when-trying-to-load-desktop/#findComment-2633558 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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