I found my Disk Warrior CD and will boot from it and use it on the laptop HD tonight. The problem I bought it for was on an external HD and the download was sufficient for that task. I found the CD in the unopened mailer box in my office.

I did also go into my file sharing options and while the overall Windows sharing option was unchecked, there was a checked option on my user account for sharing windows. I unchecked that as well.

I haven’t seen a hang since doing all of this, but then I have seen it 3 times in the last week so 24 hours without a hang doesn’t tell me that much. When I go 2 weeks without one then I’ll start to feel more comfortable.

Thanks for all of the advice.

If you’ve got it, use it. Use it now–before things get worse. With your issues I can almost guarantee it will find directory issues and will very likely be able to cure them. After you have your directory structure healthy again, run DiskWarrior every couple of months. It will surprise you and catch an error every now and again. You will notice your boot times speed up dramatically after a DiskWarrior tuneup.

In the future if you have a system anomaly, especially a recurring one, use DiskWarrior as your first, and primary, line of defense.

I’ve been running Mac’s back to the 68030 days and have used DW since OS 10.0. 3 Macs in the household currently, including a 8-core Mac Pro and a couple of MacBooks. The only reason not to use it is if you can’t afford it. If it makes you feel more secure, and you have a spare external drive, use Carbon Copy Cloner (freeware, donation accepted) to make a clone of your system before. If you’ve already got Time Machine running, you’re already backed up.

If you have a lot of data on your drive it can take a long time to repair (overnight). Also it may appear that nothing is happening during the repair (spinning progress bar) but eventually it will finish.

for MANY YEARS.

it’s not new.

and it’s not hardware.

it /is/ apple’s dogged refusal to adopt modern engineering methods: UML, SDL, unit-testing, AOP, pattern languages, etc – you name it, apple RELIGIOUSLY refuses to do it …

and we all pay the price.

network calls like these should never be synchronous! … they should be asynchronous (in fact, cocoa WANTS to Do The Right Thing – it has delegates, proxies, facades – but apple’s own iApps often blatantly ignore Apple’s own tool guidelines -

(eg: the iphone management console in itunes has a (brutally misleadingly named) “information” tab (aka SYNC!) which does NOT use gui disclosure controls to cue the reader that there is a long list of ‘containers’ which may be accessed to get/set prefs (eg sync bookmarks) … even though the HIG would pretty much make any other design choice impossible).

And for the record, you’ve never been able to buy AppleCare retroactively after the original warranty expires. Was really annoying when my Mum’s iBook screen died after two years and I only then realised I had forgotten to buy AppleCare for it.

I have not installed any funky third part apps, I am not trying to do any Windows networking. I went into Login Items and took out a few things that I don’t need anymore but none of them seemed related. I did repair permissions which also fixed some things but nothing that jumped out at me as being relevant. I have previously purchased Disk Warrior and can use it if need be.

At the times these hangs occurred, I’m pretty sure this MacBook was the only active computer on the internal network. All the other Macs were powered down and the other Windows machines were sleeping.

If it hangs again, I will try to ssh in. I’ll also try to disable Samba. I’m not going to shut down Bluetooth because I do use it, and I haven’t done any updates to the firmware on there. Last software updates were Safari and Java on 6/19. First hang was observed 7/3.

It’s almost certainly not RAM. This first occurred on the original OEM RAM and I put in my 4 GB upgrade from Otherworld Computing on 7/6 and it has since hung. That was just dumb luck that it was already on the way when I first got the hang.

http://www.macsurfer.com

I visit the site twice a day and usually check out a couple of links – tonite one of them was yours. Hope you find out what’s causing the freeze ups!

You need to spring for DiskWarrior and rebuild your catalog index. That’s the only way I’ve solved problems requiring hard restarts.

http://devworld.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/
ManPages/man1/nmblookup.1.html

It’s part of Samba. Are you trying to link to a NAS via Samba? If you are not doing so explicitly, then something on your computer is. As I said, if your computer is trying to link to a nonexistant network device, the OS may very well be slow as molasses until it times out. Then again it may be a bug and never resolve.

run daily weekly and monthly maintenance scripts.
Then clean user cache.

you might also try repairing disk permissions via Disk Utility.

doing those 3 things will fix 80% of Mac OS X weirdness.

if none of those work, try booting the computer in safe mode by holding down the shift key while turning it on. keep shift held down until the grey apple and spinning thing come up.
then reboot normally. safe boot will do a fsck, and remove some other cache files…

Good luck.

Turn off everything. Reboot.

You seem to be loading a Windows networking function which you don’t need. I’m guessing that you installed some funky third party utility that is messing you up.

If that fixes it, go back and add login items one at a time to see which one is causing the problem.

Yacko, I am not doing any Windows networking and I have no windows mounts. There are Windows machines that are also on on internal network but I’m not connecting to them. In one case, logging and system clock were stopped at 2:15 AM and it was dead at 6:30 AM when I went to look at it.

Nothing of note in anything I can find in anything in /var/log, nor the crash reporter. The only reason I am implicating nmblookup is I happened to notice them spawning right at a hang one time. It could have been coincidence.

Jim, I’ll have to check. I don’t think I did. I went back and looked at my System Update log and the last one was 6/26 . I can try turning off Bluetooth and see, although since the hang can go days between occurrences it might take a while to see.

Thanks guys, I’ll keep plugging.