Entire Computer Randomly Freezing

[cp2]

Hello,

I'm having issues with freezing and the 'spinning ball' and not sure what to do.

I have an older Mac Pro (early 2008) running OS X 10.8.5. The hard drive is 1T but pretty loaded up with software.

I run mostly music software (Pro Tools) and all of a sudden it starts freezing the entire computer randomly, I have to do a hard reboot, not good. It will freeze with smaller programs, not just Pro Tools.

I run disk utility, verify disk, repair permissions and when I turn the machine on the next day, all the same errors/repairs come up. It never seems to actually repair anything.

I ran diskwarrior and it apparently fixed many issues, but highlighted in red were about 200 items that had property list data damage (can't be repaired) and 10 resource data damage (can't be repaired).

Do I have to delete all of these items and if so, will the programs they're associated with still run?

Any insights on how to stop this random freezing?

Thanks!

 

[BrianBaughn]

My suggestion is to get replace your hard drive ASAP. Diskwarrior being unable to fix is a bad sign, in my experience. A sudden, total failure of the drive at this point wouldn't surprise me. If it were mine I wouldn't bother trying to correct the issue or do anything else until I've attempted cloning [recommend Carbon Copy Cloner] it to a new drive.

If you have a Time Machine backup or other complete backup that's up-to-date you could try reformatting your hard drive and restoring from the backup. If the drive checks out OK after reformatting you'll have to make the call on whether or not you can trust it.

This is a opportunity to upgrade your computer with an SSD as from your description it seems you're not running one, currently.

One more thing...there is always the possibility that the corruption on your hard drive could be caused by an unreliable part such as a cable or motherboard issue.

How much space is free on your current drive?

 

[cp2]

Sorry for my late response, but here's what I've been doing:
1) cloned the drive with CCC to an external drive.
2) booted from the external and still freezes, tells me the original HD is not faulty.
3) ran disk utility from original HD to repair the external HD. This was what I saw after I verified disk permissions:

4) repaired permissions, said they were fixed:

5) Still from the orig HD, I ran Diskwarrior to repair the external drive:

6) Here is a partial list of what it couldn't repair:

7) Then I ran CleanMyMac on the external clone, said it cleaned up around 25GB of space.
After all of that, I boot up from the clone and IT STILL FREEZES! What am I missing here?

Also to answer your question, the original HD is 1TB and pretty maxed out at about 975GB. I cloned to a 2TB drive so there's now over 1TB of free space, still freezes.

Thoughts?

 

[BrianBaughn]

When you say you "2) booted from the external and still freezes, tells me the original HD is not faulty” does that mean you checked the original HD after reformatting it?

 

[cp2]

When you say you "2) booted from the external and still freezes, tells me the original HD is not faulty” does that mean you checked the original HD after reformatting it?

I didn't reformat the original HD. Since the drive appeared to be failing I made a clone with CCC to an external drive. My plan is to get everything working properly from the external drive first, then get a new HD and install it in the computer and copy everything from the external to the new HD. Although it doesn't appear to be failing at the moment it is fairly old and is probably just a matter of time.

 

[BrianBaughn]

The unfixed errors that Diskwarrior couldn’t fix are in files. If you clone the files then you are cloning the errors. Now that you have a backup (the clone) you should start with a fresh install of macOS on an SSD and build it from scratch…don’t use Migration Assistant.