@BEGINFILEID.DIZDark Unicorn Dispatch Newsletter Nov/Dec Issue Dark Unicorn Productions' bi-monthly newsletter. This issue: CD32/SX-1, CD titles and where to get them, software. Press the power button once to turn your Mac back on. Then, hold down the Option key on your keyboard until the Startup Managerappears. Select your startup disk from the list of drives that appear on screen. If your computer finishes starting up normally, choose System Preferences from the Apple menu.
The rainbow-colored circle is a painful sight to see for Mac users. If you're lucky it disappears in a few seconds, but more often it remains for minutes, leaving you helplessly locked out of the app or your whole Mac. Since it's not always clear how to deal with with the wheeling cursor or what caused it in the first place, let's break it all down. In this article we'll take a look at what is the spinning beach ball, why and when it shows up, and what you can do about it.
What is a spinning color wheel?
Initially, it's a system indicator. It's official name is the Spinning Wait Cursor, not so official — the Spinning Beach Ball of Death or SBBOD. The ball signifies that your Mac cannot handle all the tasks given to it at this moment.
Every app on your Mac has a so-called window server. When an app receives more events than it can process, the window server automatically shows you the spinning ball. It usually takes about 4 seconds for the app to decide that it's non-responsive.
Why does the Mac spinning wheel of death appear?
Well, the reasons are countless. First, it can be a stand-alone issue with a certain app. Second, it could be faulty hardware or insufficient RAM. We'll go over each possible issue and see how it can be fixed, depending on the cause. Sometimes, the only way out it getting a new Mac, but most of the cases can be fixed with the right software or system commands.
How to stop the spinning ball on Mac?
In case you just need unlock one frozen application, that's a job for Force Quit.
To fix an application stuck with a spinning cursor right now:
- Click the Apple icon in the top left corner.
- Choose Force Quit (or press cmd+alt+esc).
- Select the app that won't respond.
- Click Force Quit.
Simply shutting down the process is a brutal way of problem solving and it doesn't address the issue that caused the freezing. It could have been an accidental glitch in the program, but if it keeps freezing or spreads further to other software and services, you need to look deeper.
What if the application keeps freezing when you open it again?
Reset or reinstall the freezing application. Macs don't have a proper uninstaller and moving applications to the Trash bin leaves plenty of app leftovers. Some of them could be the reason why the spinning wheel showed up, so if you leave them the issue will stay.
How to reset a Mac app to its default settings or uninstall it
There are two ways to reset apps: one would be to use application's own preferences or settings and look for reset options there. But in case the app won't let you do that (because it keeps freezing), you can turn to third-party solutions, like CleanMyMac X for instance. It's a handy app for Mac maintenance and cleaning with plenty of useful tools, including reset and uninstallation.
- Download CleanMyMac X, an app for Mac maintenance.
- Open it and click on the Uninstaller.
- Select the app you need to reset from the list.
- Click on the small arrow next to the application icon
- Click Applications Reset.
If the beach ball keeps rolling when you use the app again, reinstall it completely by pressing Uninstall instead or Reset. Remember, simply moving the app to the Trash doesn't do the trick, since its leftover files remain on your hard drive.
Important: if you have a licence for the paid app, makes sure to save the number somewhere.
What if your whole Mac becomes unresponsive?
Possible issue: Overworked processor
One of the reasons for the wheel to show up could be that your Mac is getting old. You can figure out if that's the case by checking the CPU usage. To check the CPU usage, turn to Activity monitor. Find it in the Applications/Utilities folder or run a Spotlight search. Or, if you have CleanMyMac X, use it's Menu in the top bar.
The bottom table shows System load in percentage. If it's way above 50% and remains there for long, especially without any specific reason like games or heavy rendering programs, this might be the signal your processor is the bottleneck.
Fix: If your processor is overworking regularly, only buying a new Mac will fix the problem entirely. Sorry.
Possible issue: Low disk space
You don't even need to have a full startup disk to see the nasty ball. Just a heavily loaded hard drive, with lots of large files can already cause troubles with loading.
Fix: Hard drive cleanup. Space battle zero mac os. Thankfully, that's an easy task. You can get CleanMyMac X and in free up tons of space in a few minutes. With CleanMyMac you don't need to dig into folders and look for files you don't need, the app will find and sort them, plus all the system junk your Mac has been accumulating for months.
Possible issue: Insufficient RAM
Another possible hardware issue is insufficient Random Access Memory. To figure out if you need more RAM, open the Activity Monitor again. It's in the Applications/Utilities folder. In the Memory tab, you can see Memory pressure table with a graph. If the graph is red and your memory is constantly strained under all the running apps, you've found the problem.
Fix: You can upgrade RAM by buying and installing more of it. It's usually enough to have 8 GB for most tasks and applications, apart from heavy video rendering and the likes. Here's a detailed guide on how to upgrade RAM on Mac.
Spinning Sky Rabbit Mac Os 11
That's about it concerning the spinning beach ball and how to deal with it. We hope this guide has been of help and you'll stop the spinning wheel of death on your Mac once and for all.
If you are reading this, you probably know why you want to run SpinRite. SpinRite is a hard drive recovery utility intended to run stand-alone on Windows machines. There is really nothing comparable to it for the Macintosh, especially in its ability to recover data from corrupted hard drives.
The other instructions I found on the web for SpinRite on the Mac were variously outdated, contained bad links or were overly complicated. I had to hunt around multiple web sites to find bits and pieces of the instructions. Here is my attempt to write a coherent single set of instructions for SpinRite on the Mac.
I don't want you to go through this process with false expectations. There are some limitations to SpinRite and to running it on the Mac.
SpinRite 6.0 is glacially slow on today's large hard drives. A full scan on level 2 of a 1 TB drive with no bad sectors took 35 hours and 46 minutes. If the drive has bad sectors, or you use level 4, it will take much longer.
SpinRite 6.0 can't handle drives larger than 2 TB at all.
SpinRite hasn't been updated by its author since 2004. Steve Gibson says he plans to release updated versions 6.1 (much faster and supports larger drives) and 7 (with support for the Mac), but it could be a while.
SpinRite can operate on internal and external drives, including USB drives. The S.M.A.R.T. aware features of SpinRite will not work in the virtual machine environment we will use on the Mac. However, this does not prevent SpinRite from recovering bad sectors, or refreshing marginal ones.
The good news is that you can continue to use your Mac while SpinRite, in a virtual machine, works on a hard drive. This is better than the usual situation where a physical Windows machine is dedicated to running SpinRite for the duration. However, you must not try to use SpinRite on your system boot drive (or any mounted drive). If you need to use it on your internal boot drive, you will either have to boot from another drive or connect your Mac to another Mac in target disk mode and run SpinRite from the other Mac.
Overview
This is an advanced topic. I assume if you are planning to run SpinRite that you are somewhat familiar with running DOS-based programs, such as SpinRite, and that you are willing to use the Mac's Terminal command line.
You must perform these steps from an administrator account, or one with sudo access (usually only admin accounts). (At least from step 4 on.)
Use caution with connecting physical and virtual drives! Make sure that you are connecting the correct drives to your virtual machine, and that you are running SpinRite on the drive you intend. If you connect a RAW drive to a virtual machine while it is mounted by MacOS, you risk utter destruction of data on that drive. (Although VirtualBox seemingly tries to prevent you from doing this.)
Here is the executive summary of what you are going to do:
- Get SpinRite
- Get VirtualBox
- Get FreeDOS (sort of a MS-DOS replacement)
- Install FreeDOS into VirtualBox
- Install SpinRite into VirtualBox
- Connect your problem drive to Virtual Box, so SpinRite can work on it
Instructions
0. Get SpinRite – Buy and download SpinRite from grc.com if you don't already have it.
1. Download and Install VirtualBox
https://www.virtualbox.org/ (It's free)
- Download the latest version for OS X (currently 5.2.22)
- Install it.
- Open VirtualBox
- Create a new machine for DOS
- Accept the defaults (32 MB RAM, 500 MB expandable virtual hard disk)
- In Settings/System/Processor for the new machine, set the Execution Cap slider to about 45%. This keeps the virtual machine from spinning up your fans and running down your battery.
2. Get FreeDOS – Download and install FreeDOS from freedos.org. (It's free)
Select the CDROM 'standard' installer distribution. You'll get a file something like FD12CD.iso.
The current version 1.2 is acceptable. You are going to install FreeDOS into the VirtualBox virtual machine you created above.
3. Install FreeDOS into Virtual Box
In Virtual Box, Click on your FreeDOS machine. Select Settings/Storage. Click on the empty optical drive icon. To mount your FreeDOS image click on the CD icon on the far right, and choose it using Choose Virtual Optical Disk File
Select the FreeDOS ISO image (FD12CD.iso).
You are now going to boot your virtual machine for the first time to install FreeDOS onto your virtual hard drive. It will help to understand some features of the Virtual Box user interface. You will need to click in the virtual machine window to allow you to type into it. When you do that, the virtual machine will 'capture' your mouse and keyboard. To release the mouse and keyboard, to do anything else on your Mac, you can press the left ⌘ (command) key.
Spinningskyrabbit Mac Os Catalina
There is a bug between VirtualBox and FreeDOS that will cause the virtual machine to crash with a messy string of Invalid Opcode messages if you simply follow the prompts. There is a workaround, and here it is.
Select your virtual DOS machine in Virtual Box. Press Start. The virtual machine window will appear, and it should boot into the FreeDOS installer screen. There is a countdown running (50 seconds) which you need to stop. Click in the virtual machine window and press the TAB key. That will stop the timer. You are now editing the Install to harddisk menu option. Add the word raw (lower case) after the command line. Press return.
You should now be in the installer at the preferred language prompt. Proceed.
When asked if you want to partition Drive C:, select Yes. And also select Yes – Please reboot now. Once again, intercept the countdown with a tab and add raw to the command line.
You will be back to the installer preferred language prompt. Proceed. This time you will be asked if you want to format C:. Say Yes. Then choose your keyboard format (perhaps different from your preferred language).
At the prompt What FreeDOS packages do you want to install?, Choose Base packages only. This is sufficient for SpinRite.
Naturally, you will choose Yes – Please install FreeDOS 1.2.
When the install is complete, you will be asked if you want to reboot. Don't do it yet. Wait until step 4b, below.
4. Install SpinRite Into VirtualBox
4a. You will Create a CD image with spinrite.exe on it. This will be used to get SpinRite.exe into the Virtual machine. When SpinRite runs, it can create an ISO containing itself. If you already have a SpinRite ISO created by SpinRite on a Windows machine you may use that and skip the rest of this step (skip to 4b).
Create a folder named 'spinrite' in your Downloads folder. Put spinrite.exe into that folder.
Open a Terminal window. Immunity (itch) mac os. Enter this command into the terminal:
(Enter the command all on one line.) This will create a file on your desktop named image.iso containing spinrite.exe . This image is of a type acceptable to Virtual Box. If you create an image with Disk Utility instead, it will not work.
4b. In VirtualBox Manager, select your DOS machine, and pick Settings/Storage. Again, using the optical disk icon on the far right, choose the image.iso file we created on your desktop in step 4a, above. Click OK to save settings.
Now, back in the virtual machine, select Yes-Please reboot now and press enter. You don't need to intercept the boot process anymore. Wait for the machine to boot into FreeDOS and the C:> prompt.
SpinRite can operate on internal and external drives, including USB drives. The S.M.A.R.T. aware features of SpinRite will not work in the virtual machine environment we will use on the Mac. However, this does not prevent SpinRite from recovering bad sectors, or refreshing marginal ones.
The good news is that you can continue to use your Mac while SpinRite, in a virtual machine, works on a hard drive. This is better than the usual situation where a physical Windows machine is dedicated to running SpinRite for the duration. However, you must not try to use SpinRite on your system boot drive (or any mounted drive). If you need to use it on your internal boot drive, you will either have to boot from another drive or connect your Mac to another Mac in target disk mode and run SpinRite from the other Mac.
Overview
This is an advanced topic. I assume if you are planning to run SpinRite that you are somewhat familiar with running DOS-based programs, such as SpinRite, and that you are willing to use the Mac's Terminal command line.
You must perform these steps from an administrator account, or one with sudo access (usually only admin accounts). (At least from step 4 on.)
Use caution with connecting physical and virtual drives! Make sure that you are connecting the correct drives to your virtual machine, and that you are running SpinRite on the drive you intend. If you connect a RAW drive to a virtual machine while it is mounted by MacOS, you risk utter destruction of data on that drive. (Although VirtualBox seemingly tries to prevent you from doing this.)
Here is the executive summary of what you are going to do:
- Get SpinRite
- Get VirtualBox
- Get FreeDOS (sort of a MS-DOS replacement)
- Install FreeDOS into VirtualBox
- Install SpinRite into VirtualBox
- Connect your problem drive to Virtual Box, so SpinRite can work on it
Instructions
0. Get SpinRite – Buy and download SpinRite from grc.com if you don't already have it.
1. Download and Install VirtualBox
https://www.virtualbox.org/ (It's free)
- Download the latest version for OS X (currently 5.2.22)
- Install it.
- Open VirtualBox
- Create a new machine for DOS
- Accept the defaults (32 MB RAM, 500 MB expandable virtual hard disk)
- In Settings/System/Processor for the new machine, set the Execution Cap slider to about 45%. This keeps the virtual machine from spinning up your fans and running down your battery.
2. Get FreeDOS – Download and install FreeDOS from freedos.org. (It's free)
Select the CDROM 'standard' installer distribution. You'll get a file something like FD12CD.iso.
The current version 1.2 is acceptable. You are going to install FreeDOS into the VirtualBox virtual machine you created above.
3. Install FreeDOS into Virtual Box
In Virtual Box, Click on your FreeDOS machine. Select Settings/Storage. Click on the empty optical drive icon. To mount your FreeDOS image click on the CD icon on the far right, and choose it using Choose Virtual Optical Disk File
Select the FreeDOS ISO image (FD12CD.iso).
You are now going to boot your virtual machine for the first time to install FreeDOS onto your virtual hard drive. It will help to understand some features of the Virtual Box user interface. You will need to click in the virtual machine window to allow you to type into it. When you do that, the virtual machine will 'capture' your mouse and keyboard. To release the mouse and keyboard, to do anything else on your Mac, you can press the left ⌘ (command) key.
Spinningskyrabbit Mac Os Catalina
There is a bug between VirtualBox and FreeDOS that will cause the virtual machine to crash with a messy string of Invalid Opcode messages if you simply follow the prompts. There is a workaround, and here it is.
Select your virtual DOS machine in Virtual Box. Press Start. The virtual machine window will appear, and it should boot into the FreeDOS installer screen. There is a countdown running (50 seconds) which you need to stop. Click in the virtual machine window and press the TAB key. That will stop the timer. You are now editing the Install to harddisk menu option. Add the word raw (lower case) after the command line. Press return.
You should now be in the installer at the preferred language prompt. Proceed.
When asked if you want to partition Drive C:, select Yes. And also select Yes – Please reboot now. Once again, intercept the countdown with a tab and add raw to the command line.
You will be back to the installer preferred language prompt. Proceed. This time you will be asked if you want to format C:. Say Yes. Then choose your keyboard format (perhaps different from your preferred language).
At the prompt What FreeDOS packages do you want to install?, Choose Base packages only. This is sufficient for SpinRite.
Naturally, you will choose Yes – Please install FreeDOS 1.2.
When the install is complete, you will be asked if you want to reboot. Don't do it yet. Wait until step 4b, below.
4. Install SpinRite Into VirtualBox
4a. You will Create a CD image with spinrite.exe on it. This will be used to get SpinRite.exe into the Virtual machine. When SpinRite runs, it can create an ISO containing itself. If you already have a SpinRite ISO created by SpinRite on a Windows machine you may use that and skip the rest of this step (skip to 4b).
Create a folder named 'spinrite' in your Downloads folder. Put spinrite.exe into that folder.
Open a Terminal window. Immunity (itch) mac os. Enter this command into the terminal:
(Enter the command all on one line.) This will create a file on your desktop named image.iso containing spinrite.exe . This image is of a type acceptable to Virtual Box. If you create an image with Disk Utility instead, it will not work.
4b. In VirtualBox Manager, select your DOS machine, and pick Settings/Storage. Again, using the optical disk icon on the far right, choose the image.iso file we created on your desktop in step 4a, above. Click OK to save settings.
Now, back in the virtual machine, select Yes-Please reboot now and press enter. You don't need to intercept the boot process anymore. Wait for the machine to boot into FreeDOS and the C:> prompt.
The SpinRite 'CD' should now be mounted as drive D:. Type the DOS command:
This will copy Spinrite to your virtual C: drive. At this point, you now have a virtual machine with a virtual hard drive containing SpinRite, and you no longer need the image.iso image. You may remove that from the virtual drive if you like.
5. Connect the Problem Drive to VirtualBox and SpinRite
In the terminal, create a shell script as follows:
Then, copy the script below, and paste it into the terminal.
Then type
ctrl-D (End-of-file)
Now make your script executable with:
Make sure the drive to be tested is connected and powered on. You need to figure out what the device ID associated with the drive under test is. It will be of the form 'diskX', for example, it might be 'disk5'. You can find this in Disk Utility, in the lower right corner.
If you see a suffix, e.g., disk5s1, ignore the suffix. This is the disk name you will need in the next step.
While you are in Disk Utility, go ahead and unmount all partitions on the drive to be tested, if any are mounted.
In the terminal, run the script:
Because the script contains sudo commands, you will be prompted for a password. Enter your Mac signon password. As mentioned above, this will only work for admin accounts, or accounts for which the user has been added to the file /etc/sudoers . When prompted, enter the device ID (disk name), e.g. disk5 . A vmdk file icon will appear on your desktop named appropriately.
In VirtualBox, go to the storage settings for your virtual machine.
Click the hard-drive-plus icon to add a new hard drive to the virtual IDE controller. At the prompt, select Choose Existing Disk, and then select the VirtualRawdiskx file you created on your desktop earlier.
If the FreeDOS CD is still mounted in your virtual machine, as shown above, remove it from the virtual drive so that your machine boots from your virtual hard drive. If you click on the .iso, the remove option then appears if you click the optical disk icon in the far right of the dialog box.
Very likely, at this point, your target disk may have remounted itself. Eject/Unmount it before proceeding. VirtualBox will complain about being unable to access the VirtualDrive if partitions on the physical drive are still in use. Eject it using DiskUtility or the Finder.
In VirtualBox, start your virtual machine. It should boot up to the FreeDOS command prompt.
Issue the DOS command:
You are now running SpinRite on a Mac! As promised earlier, SpinRite will have no access to S.M.A.R.T. data in this scenario.
When SpinRite is done (much, much later), you should restore the correct disk permissions. Leaving the raw disk permissions with world access is a security risk.
In the terminal you can restore them with, for example:
If disk5 was your target disk. Check that the permissions are correct with
The raw disk files should all have the same permissions:
I hope these instructions were helpful for you. Thanks for reading.
Reference Material:
Extended installation Instructions for FreeDOS are here:
