I believe you should reboot. Stop smartctl, reboot and run the echo command as soon as possible after that. Check again with 'top' that nothing else is using you CPU and run the other command to verify that no other hardware element is flooding the system with interrupts.Je55eah wrote: Regarding the same command, should it have taken effect as I ran it? Some time has passed now and the system has not cooled. I have not yet restarted because I am waiting for smartctl to finish but it seems to be stuck at 10% remaining. Moreover the change will not be retained across reboot until I get save files working again.
Regarding your HD, "find"(... ) DiskWarrior5 and run it first if you did not already. The more you poke with other tools the harder will be to recover anything from the HD, if is not a hardware failure.
If this is true you may have totally different problems.Je55eah wrote: My thought was that the Mac seems to be unable to boot from CD, DVD, or USB in its current state that I should format the USB with GPT then do the second option
Not sure if you are a Mac user but booting from CD you need to press the 'C" key and to boot from anything else than the HD you need to press the 'option' key. If these fail you may want to reset the NVRAM with Command-Option-P-R. See more boot options here