Yosemite - Beachballs. Beachball. SBOD. Random, intermittent, sporadic, and periodic?

[GeoFan49]

Since upgrading from Snow Leopard to Yosemite, about five days ago...

Random, intermittent, sporadic, and periodic:
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Hangs, Beachballs, Beachball, SBOD.
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. . . MBP MacBook Pro 64-Bit Core2Duo 2.53GHz MacBookPro5,4 Mid-2009 15" MC118LL/A Unibody aluminum. Upgraded RAM, Internal HDD, and new battery in 2013. Currently 8GB RAM, 1TB HD, Mac OS X 10.10.1 Yosemite . . . External Buffalo 2TB for TimeMachine backups…
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Yosemite is awesome, especially since I have an iPad Air, as well as a MacBook Pro mid-2009.

However, there are some PROBLEMS

Yes, I know I SHOULDDA wouldda couldda done a CLEAN INSTALL...
. . . but I shudder to think of all the things that I would have to remember to setup...

Now, I have the dreaded SBOD, aka Spinning BEACHBALL of Death, and frequent inexplicable hangs.

No CPU or DISC or RAM or NETWORK bottlenecks, according to Activity Monitor, at least.

Something in the system just HANGS for 30~60 seconds (or more) every 15~20 minutes (or less.)
Sometimes it just freezes/hangs (with or without the SBOD.)

Sometimes the mouse still moves — and the clock still shows ticking time — but the DOCK will not expand or come alive, and clicks do not seem to register in the event queue.

SOMETIMES the system comes back alive after 30~60 seconds, sometimes after a few minutes — sometimes not at all — waited overnight, spinning beachball still there in the morning...

Bummer!!! ANNOYING!!!!!

Any suggestions, please? How to diagnose the cause of these Yosemite hangs/beachballs/SBODs?

HELP?!

 

[Fishrrman]

My opinion, and mine only.

You have two realistic choices:
1. Put in an SSD
or
2. Go back to 10.6.8.

I still use Snow Leopard as the "Main OS" on my 2010 MB Pro -- runs great.
I also have a 2nd partition with Mountain Lion installed -- runs well, too.

 

[Weaselboy]

Contrary to what many think, you do not need an SSD to run Yosemite. Sure it will be faster, and if you have a failing hard drive causing issues an SSD will fix that of course. But running Yosemite on a hard drive in itself does not cause the issues you are seeing.

It sounds like you may have a utility or app that is causing a conflict with Yosemite. Try downloading and running the app Etrecheck and post the report up here for us to look at. That will show everything you have running.

 

[GeoFan49]

Since it was more than five years (and three Macs) since my last clean install, I decided I had to bite the bullet and so I have done a clean install. Restoring from Time Machine and then doing an update from 10.6.8 to 10.10.1 just did not cut it.

Now I must only reinstall about 15 or 20 of my very favorite apps from the past 10 years, 50% of which are not available on Yosemite... Looking for alternatives, replacements. Yosemite is nice, but I wonder if I will ever get back the last few days I wasted.

With Yosemite 10.10.1 — booting takes about twice as long as Snow Leopard 10.6.8 did (over two minutes versus less than one minute.)

Edit 1:
Same hardware... Once it does boot, it seems about the same performance as snow leopard. It's been a few days, and the hangs, crashes, and spinning beachballs are all gone now. Woo hoo!

Edit 2: One problem does remain.

After installing from the 10.10.1 installer, I didn't get a 10.10 recovery partition. I did create two extra 40 GB partitions for alternate booting, experiments, etc. At least one of those partitions has the Yosemite installer (.DMG) — so when I use option boot, I do see an EFI boot partition. However it's not an official recovery partition. So there are a few nice features of Yosemite that I cannot use, because I don't have any recovery partition that is official.

1TB HARD DRIVE (new, 01/2015) HGST Travelstar 7200 RPM with 32 MB cache

• 900 GB boot partition for Yosemite.
• 40 GB boot partition (for alternate booting, currently 10.10.1)
• 40 GB (another alternate boot partition for future use)
• 16 GB Extra partition, empty, just for contingencies...
• 4 GB DOS FAT partition just for fun.​

 

[simonsi]

With Yosemite 10.10.1 — booting takes about twice as long as Snow Leopard 10.6.8 did.

Well of course, Yosemite does way more that needs time at boot and shutdown than SL, as you are using the same HW it is bound to take longer.

Suspect your recovery partition issue is because Yosemite likes to convert the drive to Core Storage which DU can't manage so you can't then adjust partitions on the drive.

Search "revert core storage" on here, there are instructions on how to convert back to HFS where you can manage/adjust partitions as normal.

 

[GeoFan49]

. . . Suspect your recovery partition issue is because Yosemite likes to convert the drive to Core Storage which DU can't manage so you can't then adjust partitions on the drive.

Search "revert core storage" on here, there are instructions on how to convert back to HFS where you can manage/adjust partitions as normal.

Studying THIS for info on creating a recovery partition...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1808746/

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How do I know I don't have a Recovery Partition?

So, now, how can I get one?

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[damidget]

Studying THIS for info on creating a recovery partition...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1808746/

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How do I know I don't have a Recovery Partition?

Image

So, now, how can I get one?

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Image

Best bet would be to google it and find a reliable source.

 

[ZVH]

I do beta testing for SCSC, the guys who make Scannerz (http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html)

Let's get one thing straight first: I DON'T LIKE YOSEMITE AT ALL!!! I think it's butt ugly. However, the problems you're having aren't normal.

Scannerz is a hard drive/SSD/system test tool, and the problems you have could easily sound like hard drive/SSD problems - but I think it's unlikely. Why? What's the probability that your drive/SSD went bad the exact same time you installed a new OS. Possible? Yes. Likely? No.

I think it's more likely the new OS install messed up some of your firmware parameters. Try out these links to reset them:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295 - Tells you how to reset the SMC
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063 - Much less likely, but possible

As much as I dislike Yosemite's butt ugly appearance (an opinion, obviously) it seems to me that unless you're actually suffering from a bonafide hardware failure, which is possible, but unlikely, it's a firmware modification or a hardware/kernel extension conflict. A firmware problem should theoretically be corrected using the links above. If there's a bad kext file from an incompatible app, and there are lots of them with Yosemite, try booting in Safe Mode to see if it boots/operates faster. Finally, Yosemite just doesn't seem to play well with some of Apple's systems. That I can't help you with.

 

[GeoFan49]

Best bet would be to google it and find a reliable source.

That is what I did, but mostly getting things that apply to Pre-Release Yosemite from last summer.

Looking for (and not finding) a more recent, simpler guide to ::

HOW TO CREATE A RECOVERY PARTITION on Yosemite.
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My 1 TB drive has an 800 GB partition for Yosemite, and it is not even half full.

To complete my Yosemite experience, I want an official 10.10.1 Recovery Partition.

Help?

 

[Weaselboy]

To complete my Yosemite experience, I want an official 10.10.1 Recovery Partition.

Help?

You may have one and not realize it. If the Yosemite install converted the volume to core storage, you will not see the recovery partition with an option key boot. But you will boot to it with a command-r boot.

You can also run the command below in Terminal that will show the 650MB Recovery HD partition in the command output.

diskutil list

If you do not have a recovery partition, you can just go to the App Store and redownload Yosemite and install it over top of your existing install and it will create a recovery partition.

Or you can use this tool if you already have the installer DMG. I have not used this tool myself but others here report it works.