MacBook Pro (mid 2009) spinning wheel

We’ve all seen the spinning wheel, it’s a pain and often it hangs around for a while.  I started seeing this regularly a week ago and did what we all do, jumped on Google and found all sorts of help.

One of these help pages suggested firing up the OSX Console and keeping an eye on the logs around the time the hang up happened.  Sure enough I saw this;

disk0s2: I/O error.

So I used the search text filter in console and got the following result;

The disk0 I/O error was occurring at the top of every hour so another Google pointed at Spotlight and suggested going into Spotlight’s preferences, adding the hard disk to the Private list, then taking it out again a while later to trigger a Spotlight re-index.

A couple of hours later I have noticed that the spinning wheel hangups have stopped and sure enough no more disk0 I/O errors.

So it’s fixed! Well probably not, I suspect Spotlight was causing the hangs because it could not access part of it’s index and re-indexing has allowed the operating system to store the new index in good sectors on the hard disk and that the bad area that was giving the errors is still there.

As a precaution I’ve done a full image backup using Carbon Copy Cloner and ordered a replacement hard disk. I’ll be swapping the new disk in as soon as it arrives rather than wait for the old one to fail.