Issues with my Mac mini: becomes unresponsive (mouse moves but clicks, keyboard are ignored)

Question

I upgraded my Mac Mini well over a month ago, maybe two months ago, put a bigger hard drive and more RAM in it, got the RAM of crucial, following their system tool. I have had no problems with it for the first month at all and my system is much quicker too.

I only mention this as this is the only thing I can think of which has changed.

Any ways, over the last few days my system seems to become unresponsive, although I can still move the mouse pointer around the screen. If I hold the power button for several seconds to do what I think must be a cold boot, the system does boot as normal, but seems to take a few minutes longer than usual, I think.

Anyways, after I've started an application or two, no matter how long I leave it after booting up, the system becomes unresponsive, but as I say I'm able to move the mouse pointer.

I did think the other day that the system was running a little hot, but last night when it became unresponsive, it wasn't hot at all.

I ran the disk permission repair tool a couple of days ago and it did fix things, but the problem remains.

How can I diagnose my problem? I'm pretty sure I'm out of my Apple warranty, my Mac mini is a 2009 model, also I've upgraded it, hence breaking my warranty I think. FYI it running Snow Leopard.

Answer 1

This might be a pain but you should try this method first to determine if you have a bad ram. Remove one and test them individually. If both pass I have a feeling that you might have a bad drive if there's bad sector on that drive that might be problem bad sectors tend to do that type of thing. Do you still have the previous drive put that in along with your new ram and see how that reacts then you know for sure if there's a drive problem. But in order to see if there's any bad sector on that drive if you have a program called tech tool that will check all your hardware properly and also has the ability to fix corrupted files. The ones that comes with the Mac OS isn't that great.

Hope that helps

Answer 2

In Utilities there a tool called Console, open this App and check the Boot-Proccess, search for the Entry that hang or delay and post it here. There is a DateTime Field next to each LogEntry so you can search for entry with a abnormal time between two entries.

It is possible that you have a Driver Problem or a Trojan or something like this.

Answer 3

Two things you can try:

First, reboot your Mac while holding +s (command + s). This will boot your computer in Single User Mode. Then, when the prompt [yourcomputername]:~ Root$ comes up, type mount -uw (this mounts your hard drive as a writeable volume so you can perform repairs), press enter, type, fsck -f and press enter again. This will run the File System ChecK process. If anything is displayed that is not proceeded by two asterisks (**), it will run again after attempting to correct the error. If, however, it runs three times without fixing the error, you probably have a physical hard drive problem. After this completes (hopefully successfully!), reboot your machine by typing reboot and pressing enter.

Alternatively, you can boot up from your install cd (press c while booting) and run Disk Utility from the CD. Select your language, then go to the menu bar and click Utilities-->Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and click "Repair Disk."

To view the system boot logs when you cannot open Console:

1. Start up in Single User Mode as described above.
2. When the prompt appears, type syslog and follow kockiren's suggestion.

To boot up in Verbose Mode, hold +v (command + v) during startup.

Hope this helps!