[X4U] imac and beach ball

[Randy B. Singer]

On May 19, 2008, at 4:12 PM, alexandre wrote:

> i have a 24" intel imac ("late 2006") that has been working fine  
> until last friday. that day, i took it to the local mac dealer to  
> have the hard drive upgraded, from the original 250gb to a 1000gb.
...
>
> so… i'm begining to think there is a problem with the new drive.
>
> is there anything i can still do besides taking it back to the shop  
> for a hard drive exchange?

Alexandre, you have installed a new *huge* hard drive.  I don't know  
how much data you have transferred to it already, but Spotlight is  
undoubtedly indexing it.  It is even possible that your Spotlight  
database has become corrupted and that it is continually trying to  
index things to no avail.

Here is what I would do.

Run Activity Monitor, and check for percentage of CPU used, and see  
what is running that is causing a slowdown. "mds" and "mdimport" are  
Spotlight processes. If they are what is causing the slowdown,  
Spotlight probably has a corrupted database.

To fix this, Open System Preferences, choose the Spotlight panel,  
click on the Privacy tab, and drag your main drive's icon into the  
Privacy window.  Now highlight your hard drive's icon within the  
Privacy window and
click on the "-" (that is, the minus button in the Privacy Window).

Or you could highlight the hard drive icon in the Privacy window and  
hit the delete key.

This will cause the Spotlight database to be deleted and  
automatically rebuilt. (You won't be able to use Spotlight while its  
database is being rebuilt.).

After doing this, set your Mac so that it won't go to sleep, and  
leave your Mac on for 24 hours, and allow Spotlight to index your  
entire drive uninterrupted.

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________