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2010 Mac Pro Slow to Post Drives?

xgman

xgman

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 6, 2007
5,725
1,446
No matter what drive I place in one or all of the drive slots and no matter what OS is on that drive, when holding "OPT" key down and turning on the power, it is extremely slow to get to the screen where you can then click on a drive to boot from. Once clicked, it boots and operates as normal. It's just the time right after pushing the power button which is way too long.

It is also slow during this same time on a normal boot into a Snow Leopard drive of which I have a few and all behave the same. Again it's just the period right after you hit the power button that takes so long. Actually the same drives placed in a 2008 Mac pro get to the drive select screen very fast, so it's not the drives. Any ideas? is it because I have 24gb ram and it is reading that? Something wit the ATI 5870? I don't get what is causing the delay and since I can not see what si going on in the background prior to booting the OS like I can in a PC bios, I can only guess.
 
It's probably due to all that ram it has to test. One quick way to know for sure yourself is to pull some sticks and see if it improves.
 
Any other hardware in the system, such as PCIe cards?

I ask, as some things like RAID cards will add a fair bit to the boot process, and I didn't find out what the 64-Konnekt Live is in your sig for the 2010 system.
 
It is not ram my 2010 was slow with 3gb 4gb and 12gb.
It is not raid cards.
My 2010 was slow with a lot of fw800 hdds attached to it. with 3gb ram it was slow with a lot of fw800 hdds and 4gb ram it was slow with a lot of fw800 hdds and 12gb. it stayed slow when I added an esata card. It also stayed slow when I dropped all the fw800 hdds. It just takes a while to list the drives and the volumes. Now mind you I can have as many as 25 volumes on 15 drives. once they are up it is fast.


Must be the EFI protocol for drive discovery.
 
goMac said:
I'm pretty sure the 2009's and 2010's are known to do this.
Click to expand...
I know the '09 and '10 systems are slower to boot in general vs. previous Intel based MP's, but there can be issues that slow it down (add-ons that have additional firmware that has to load; PCIe cards such as eSATA, RAID, .... it doesn't have to be drive related, just additional firmware loading during the boot cycle). And a RAID card in particular, can add up to ~1.5 minutes (though usually less these days).

For example, the system could load a portion of the firmware, load a PCIe card, back to the system firmware, ... until it's completed, then begins to load the OS from the boot disk.
 
xgman said:
No matter what drive I place in one or all of the drive slots and no matter what OS is on that drive, when holding "OPT" key down and turning on the power, it is extremely slow to get to the screen where you can then click on a drive to boot from. Once clicked, it boots and operates as normal. It's just the time right after pushing the power button which is way too long.

It is also slow during this same time on a normal boot into a Snow Leopard drive of which I have a few and all behave the same. Again it's just the period right after you hit the power button that takes so long. Actually the same drives placed in a 2008 Mac pro get to the drive select screen very fast, so it's not the drives. Any ideas? is it because I have 24gb ram and it is reading that? Something wit the ATI 5870? I don't get what is causing the delay and since I can not see what si going on in the background prior to booting the OS like I can in a PC bios, I can only guess.
Click to expand...

It would help if you told us what the actual time was.

Put the original 3GB RAM back in retry.
 
The OP did say it's slow when he holds down the Option key to choose a boot drive. I have an SSD and 4 2TB drives, as well as an eSATA card, and normal boot is very fast (due to the SSD I imagine). But when I hold down the Option key, it takes a VERY long time to reach the startup choice screen. I presume it's checking every drive for a bootable OS before presenting the user with a choice of boot disks.
 
Sounds like normal behavior. I notice the same on my system but I am booting from a RAID card.

Make sure you have a partition selected in startup pref pane as this will speed the process.
 
I think its normal. I had the same on 2008 model when I had bootcamp installed. It really takes a while
 
The reason it is so slow to recognize disks is that with you moving all the disks around the pro cannot determine which drive is your boot drive without scanning each one. I had this problem when I installed a few new drives and changed the order. Also if you have been booting from multiple drives then your boot drive will not be confirmed. If you go into preferences startup disk and select the drive you want your pro to boot from it will boot up allot faster as it is pre-determined.

Hopefully this will speed up your disk selection when you try to boot in target disk mode manually (alt) because it needs to read all the drives to determine the startup disk then will show up all the drives that are bootable.

I had this problem with both a mbp 13" and my pro. I had an external drive i made a CCC backup to. I was using this as my boot disc through target disc mode, to move things over to a new installation, but after I removed the disc the new HDD was extremely slow to recognize and boot, thought there was a problem with the disk but a quick google showed that if you do the above the boot up recognition is allot faster.

Hope this helps
 
xgman said:
I don't get what is causing the delay and since I can not see what si going on in the background prior to booting the OS like I can in a PC bios, I can only guess.
Click to expand...

Hold Command-V during bootup to start in verbose mode and watch what is happening.
 
PenguinMac said:
The OP did say it's slow when he holds down the Option key to choose a boot drive. I have an SSD and 4 2TB drives, as well as an eSATA card, and normal boot is very fast (due to the SSD I imagine). But when I hold down the Option key, it takes a VERY long time to reach the startup choice screen. I presume it's checking every drive for a bootable OS before presenting the user with a choice of boot disks.
Click to expand...

Mine acts the same as yours. Fast on a normal boot or if the boot drive was predetermined in system prefs, but slow if holding down Option. However, the OP said it was also slow on a normal boot.
 
nanofrog said:
Any other hardware in the system, such as PCIe cards?

I ask, as some things like RAID cards will add a fair bit to the boot process, and I didn't find out what the 64-Konnekt Live is in your sig for the 2010 system.
Click to expand...

Non other addon's except firewire sound (Konnect Live). Same plugins as was on the fast boot 08.
 
philipma1957 said:
Must be the EFI protocol for drive discovery.
Click to expand...


My guess as well. It is just very noticeably longer (like 30 sec or so) than an identically equipped 2008 model. I guess I could try unplugging all the firewire and usb devices and see if it makes any difference.
 
tomscott1988 said:
The reason it is so slow to recognize disks is that with you moving all the disks around the pro cannot determine which drive is your boot drive without scanning each one. I had this problem when I installed a few new drives and changed the order. Also if you have been booting from multiple drives then your boot drive will not be confirmed. If you go into preferences startup disk and select the drive you want your pro to boot from it will boot up allot faster as it is pre-determined.

Hopefully this will speed up your disk selection when you try to boot in target disk mode manually (alt) because it needs to read all the drives to determine the startup disk then will show up all the drives that are bootable.

I had this problem with both a mbp 13" and my pro. I had an external drive i made a CCC backup to. I was using this as my boot disc through target disc mode, to move things over to a new installation, but after I removed the disc the new HDD was extremely slow to recognize and boot, thought there was a problem with the disk but a quick google showed that if you do the above the boot up recognition is allot faster.

Hope this helps
Click to expand...

It is set correctly to boot from the mac OS. Moving the drives shouldn't matter as it didn't in the 08. Same drives. I should replace the ram with the default and unplug everything and do more testing I guess. I wonder if it could be the 3 8GB modules. I do think it is in the bios, whatever it is.
 
ActionableMango said:
Mine acts the same as yours. Fast on a normal boot or if the boot drive was predetermined in system prefs, but slow if holding down Option. However, the OP said it was also slow on a normal boot.
Click to expand...

It used to be this case, but even after switching to an SSD, it seems to now take longer to get through the initialization stage before the OS starts loading. One it starts loading it zips.


"Hold Command-V during bootup to start in verbose mode and watch what is happening."

I'll try this. Thanks.
 
xgman said:
"Hold Command-V during bootup to start in verbose mode and watch what is happening."

I'll try this. Thanks.
Click to expand...

You may find examining the console log more helpful. It should have all the boot up info from verbose mode and more. The above will scroll by too fast to read.
 
cutterman said:
You may find examining the console log more helpful. It should have all the boot up info from verbose mode and more. The above will scroll by too fast to read.
Click to expand...

Does it log Pre-OS events? I get the same behavior even with a Windows drive alone.
 
Yes. You will see, among others, entries for CPU and other hardware init, boot drive and kernel loading.
 
Update:

held Command V down and I discovered that the delay is PRE verbose mode. So once the info screen starts rolling it is very fast. The delay is before that. About 30 sec of nothing.

I also tried unplugging the Firewire sound device just in case, but that didn't help.

I'll try the memory later, but I have a memory that even with the 3 gb stock it was much slower than the 2008, so I'm not optimistic there.

I'll reset the target disk again and try more tests and report back any chnage.

Thanks for all the suggestions in any case.
 
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