How to Fix Mac's Spinning Pinwheel of Death

How to Fix Mac's Spinning Pinwheel of Death

Once in a while, for no apparent reason, you may encounter the SPOD (Spinning Pinwheel of Death).n this case, your Mac is trying to think but nothing happens, so the pinwheel keeps spinning, and spinning, and spinning. Luckily, the SPOD is rarely a sign that your Mac is crashed. It’s more likely that a single application is not responding. If that’s the case, bringing another application to the front or clicking on the desktop will likely bring the Mac back under your control. You can then force quit the stalled application.

Repair Permissions

Repairing permissions was a good first step, provided you’re using OS X Yosemite or earlier. With the release of OS X El Capitan or later OS X, Apple added a new feature that made manually repairing file permissions no longer necessary. Now file permissions are automatically repaired whenever a software update occurs.

Repair the Disk

  1. Hold down Command (⌘)-R immediately after turning on or restarting your Mac until you see the screen to the right.
  2. Select Disk Utility and click continue.
  3. Select your computer’s hard disk volume from the left pane, then click the First Aid tab.
  4. Click Repair Disk. When the repair is finished, restart your Mac from the Apple menu.

Check your free space

If your boot drive is running out of free space, it could be causing system instability. Your boot drive (the drive containing your operating system files) should generally have at least 10 GB of free space. If you have less than this, you may start encountering errors.