Interrupting the "Spinning Wheel of Death"?
I am running Snow Leopard. It is up to date. Every few days, I get the "Spinning Wheel of Death."
- I can't do anything except hold down the power button to shut off my MacBook Pro.
- I've even tried a
kill -9 -1from a root shell that was already opened. It just hangs. - The Spin Control app just says "Sampling" on a few of the apps but is unresponsive.
Do I have any other options to shut down my laptop? I don't like to just power it off.
Update: I have no idea which app is doing this. At the moment it appears random. My fan does not spin up. Maybe it's a networking thing?
Update: Dead again. This time I had X11 running and no matter what app I switched to, I got that app's menu bar and the X11 screen. I ping and the Internet doesn't respond. My Apple router is working because I'm streaming Pandora over WiFi. I turn off the wifi and I'm still screwed. I try to power off and it won't shutdowm because X11 is running. If course, I can't kill it. Press and hold... boom. This is not how an OS is supposed to work!
Solution 1:
The beachball appears automatically when an app stops responding, and the one thing certain to cause that is disk I/O starvation. The VM system is trying to page in part of the app, and can't. The window server (which puts up the beachball) is already in RAM, and so isn't affected.
Install MenuMeters. It'll show you CPU, Net, RAM, and disk usage. I find it indispensable for figuring out which of those four limited resources is the cause of almost any slowdown.
Solution 2:
Can you do a hard drive scan, to rule that out?
I have little OSX experience but I know both Win7, Vista, and XP have major conniption fits if there are are serious underlying I/O problems on the hard drive. Any sort of blocking errors in hard drive data transfers cause the system to just go AWOL no matter what you do, very much like what you're describing.
Solution 3:
Run "fsck" (File System Check - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsck)
Boot into "single-user" mode by holding down CMD-S at startup. Hold that down and eventually your Mac will boot to a command line on a black screen. Once it's booted, type
fsck -yf
and your computer will run through the check (takes a minute or two) and will eventually finish and give you a report of either "ok" or "the file system was modified". Run it a couple of times to be sure (I've had instances where it's fixed issues, I've run it again, and it's found additional issues to fix).