MacBook Air beach balling frequently

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MacBook Air 13" Mid 2012

1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Turbo Boost up to 2.8GHz) with 3MB shared L3 cache

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Durga Mahapatra @dmahapatra

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MacBook Air beach balling frequently

My 2012 13” MacBook Air 1.8 GHz (5,2), running MacOS Mojave10.14.3 is hanging frequently.

It starts with a beach ball after which all processes come to a stand still. Left to itself the system goes into sleep mode. The same thing happens if the lid is closed. When reopened it tries to boot but fails after about 60% of progress. Left to itself, the screen goes white. After sometime there appears a folder with a question mark as if it is not able to locate the boot disk.

But it boot as expected after a forced switching off. It shows a kernel panic something like “failed after 5 attempts - quitting” on the previous boot.

This problem started following some adware attack. First it was Mackeeper which I tried to remove following all discussions on the topic killing all related files in appearing in Launch Agent, Launch Daemon in the ~\Library folder. I also used the “deleteMackeeper.sh” file suggested elsewhere. The problem persists. An Etrecheck showed a couple of problems with adware which were deleted but no improvement. I must add that my battery is failing (runs at 65 %).

Whenever the beach balling occurs, a file is created in the ~/Library folder with name “ApplicationSupport”. It has inside it only one file “ApplicationContents”. The ~/Library folder contains two files “Application Support” and “ApplicationSupport” (without any space between the words). There are also two files “Assistant” and “Assistants”. The file “Assistants” contains nothing and can’t be deleted. After every reboot I delete the “ApplicationSupport” file and it seems to help for some time. But the file is regenerated after every beach balling.

A First-Aid run in Disk Utility showed no problem and same is the case with an extended apple diagnostic check. Last night from a suggestion in MacRumors did scan with Malwarebytes and 9 issues were detected and cleaned. But the problem persists …

Any suggestion will be highly appreciated. Thanks.

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Dan @danj

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You’ll need to first backup your created data and setup a bootable OS installer USB thumb drive. Here’s how How to create a bootable macOS Mojave installer drive.

Using it to boot up you need to completely wipe your drive! using the erase function, then reformat the drive and install a fresh copy of your OS.

You don’t want to restore any apps! You want to re-download them from the Apps store or original source

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A week back fed up with this problem I did have a clean install of OSX Mojave after taking full backup. During install the disk was erased but I did not format that. May be I will have to look at this possibility.

由 Durga Mahapatra 完成的 2019年2月19日

Mine is a macair with only 4GB ram. Using the Memory clean I could see ram continuously going down even though the system was around more 98% idle. There could also be issues with OSX (Mojave). I down graded to Sierra from a Time Machine backup. I also used the Memory Clean App with an autoclean threshold of 1 GB and a refresh rate of 30 sec. The system is definitely faster and seems to have improved considerably.

由 Durga Mahapatra 完成的 2019年2月21日

I would still wipe the drive as I outlined.

Being a 4 GB system forces your OS to leverage more of the SSD for virtual RAM. So when the drive is very full there's no space to gain it! This condition also over wears the SSD, as the wear leveling SSD's need goes into overdrive as it needs to place less accessed data onto block areas that have been too active so the less used blocks can be freed up to get more wear.

So with little free space the SSD can struggle and end-up wearing more not less!

Bottomline: free up as much space as you can, you may need to replace you SSD with a bigger unit.

由 Dan 完成的 2019年2月21日

I fully agree with you. It is all related to available RAM. You are suggesting to wipe the drive. Let me understand your steps. 1. I create a bootable thumb drive. 2. I use that to boot the system and wipe out the HD drive. 3. Then format the drive, and 4. Install a fresh copy of OS. Apps can be downloaded from app store later. All this is to be done after taking a backup of the data. But can the data be loaded from a Time Machine backup or that has to be avoided ?

As it stands now, with whatever I had done, Memory Clean app shows the available RAM to be about 2 GB and the system, for more than 24 hrs has not shown any beach balling!

由 Durga Mahapatra 完成的 2019年2月22日

The reason you want to reformat the drive is give the drive a chance to put the worn blocks out of service and free up locked blocks.

TimeMachine is a backup solution so thats fine. The important part is not restoring globally in case you have a bad app or virus/malware/trojan/spyware somewhere in your backup. I would get a good anti-virus app and scan your backup before restoring.

由 Dan 完成的 2019年2月22日

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A week back fed up with this problem I did have a clean install of OSX Mojave after taking full backup. During install the disk was erased but I did not format that. May be I will have to look at this possibility. — Durga Mahapatra
Mine is a macair with only 4GB ram. Using the Memory clean I could see ram continuously going down even though the system was around more 98% idle. There could also be issues with OSX (Mojave). I down graded to Sierra from a Time Machine backup. I also used the Memory Clean App with an autoclean threshold of 1 GB and a refresh rate of 30 sec. The system is definitely faster and seems to have improved considerably. — Durga Mahapatra
I would still wipe the drive as I outlined.

Being a 4 GB system forces your OS to leverage more of the SSD for virtual RAM. So when the drive is very full there's no space to gain it! This condition also over wears the SSD, as the wear leveling SSD's need goes into overdrive as it needs to place less accessed data onto block areas that have been too active so the less used blocks can be freed up to get more wear.

So with little free space the SSD can struggle and end-up wearing more not less!

Bottomline: free up as much space as you can, you may need to replace you SSD with a bigger unit. — Dan
I fully agree with you. It is all related to available RAM. You are suggesting to wipe the drive. Let me understand your steps. 1. I create a bootable thumb drive. 2. I use that to boot the system and wipe out the HD drive. 3. Then format the drive, and 4. Install a fresh copy of OS. Apps can be downloaded from app store later. All this is to be done after taking a backup of the data. But can the data be loaded from a Time Machine backup or that has to be avoided ?

As it stands now, with whatever I had done, Memory Clean app shows the available RAM to be about 2 GB and the system, for more than 24 hrs has not shown any beach balling! — Durga Mahapatra
The reason you want to reformat the drive is give the drive a chance to put the worn blocks out of service and free up locked blocks.

TimeMachine is a backup solution so thats fine. The important part is not restoring globally in case you have a bad app or virus/malware/trojan/spyware somewhere in your backup. I would get a good anti-virus app and scan your backup before restoring. — Dan

arbaman @arbaman 声誉积分: 102.6千 10 54 291 · Answer 1 · 2019-02-19T00:18:07-07:00

arbaman @arbaman

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You can create a brand new user from system preferences, remember to choose “administrator” as the system by default creates a standard one. If beach balling continues with the new user then you likely have a hardware issue, check condition of your boot disk with disk utility and check battery status with Coconut battery. With these preliminary test we might be able to get at least some indications on where to look forward.

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How about just starting in Safe Mode

由 mayer 完成的 2019年2月19日

Thanks for the suggestion. As such there is no booting problem in safe mode. Probably what you have suggested is to run the system in this mode for a long enough time to see whether there are any problems. I will do that first.

由 Durga Mahapatra 完成的 2019年2月19日

Did run the system in Safe Mode. There is no problem in booting except it took about 10-15 min to boot. I don't know whether that is a problem. But there was a slight problem in display (flickering) while moving the curser using the track pad.

Seriously considering downgrading to Sierra from my earlier time machine backup. Yes, the battery is at 65 % (using Battery Health 2). I probably have to check with a new user account with admin privilege.

由 Durga Mahapatra 完成的 2019年2月19日

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Kevin McCartney @itamazing 声誉积分: 1.1千 8 5 1 · Answer 2 · 2019-02-19T22:37:42-07:00

Kevin McCartney @itamazing

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In light of all the things you’ve tried, it sounds like your Hard Drive cable needs replacing. The 2012 13” Macbook Pro a1278 (Non-Retina) is notorious for it’s failing cables.

MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable

I’ve attached a link to said replacement cable. :)

产品

MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable

$34.99

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We are talking about a MacBook Air where there is no hard disk. It is a flash drive and there is no cable as in MacBook Pro (MBP). The flashing question mark in MBP coming while booting is due to connecting cable failure as you have rightly said. Thanks.

由 Durga Mahapatra 完成的 2019年2月19日

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MacBook Air 13" Mid 2012

MacBook Air beach balling frequently

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MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable

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