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Slow booting Mid 2010 Macbook Pro

S

Shed209

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 11, 2014
73
1
Hi all,

Having a bit of trouble with a second hand mid 2010 Macbook Pro I've received. The trouble is that it boots very slowly (about 2min 45s). I do not have the disks to reinstall the OS, which would have been my first choice. When I went onto Firefox I did notice that it was defaulting to a rather strange search page, which reminded me of when a PC gets infected and it changes the home page. No idea if that could be a possibility on a Mac (very new territory to me). The other thing is that the optical drive isn't working properly and I will need to replace that, but I'm not sure if that could affect the boot.

Thanks in advance.

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Another piece of information: as soon as I tried to run an application called 'Get Tube' (was curious what it might be), a screen came up saying something about donations if you like the software, and then the whole system immediately restarted.

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Second time trying to run Get Tube and it worked.
 
Some form of Mavericks. I tried to do the Internet Recovery but it needed Apple account information, which I don't have.
 
DangerousDave2k said:
Some form of Mavericks. I tried to do the Internet Recovery but it needed Apple account information, which I don't have.
Click to expand...

You need to buy a copy of 10.7. I think it's $20. After your have purchased it with your Apple ID, just use that to log in using internet recovery and restore the computer.
 
I don't currently have an Apple ID. Is it something that is free to make?
 
T5BRICK said:
You need to buy a copy of 10.7. I think it's $20. After your have purchased it with your Apple ID, just use that to log in using internet recovery and restore the computer.
Click to expand...

It is a pain to buy OS X 10.7 since you have to call apple. Instead, OP should download mavericks from the app store for free, and then do internet recovery for a clean install.
 
I have an April 2010 MacBook Pro as well.

It came with 10.6.x installed, and I still use 10.6.8 as my "main boot partition".

I've also installed 10.8.5 on a smaller secondary partition, and it boots and runs fine from that, too.

What follows is my opinion only (others' will differ):
I would strongly advise you to NOT USE Mavericks as your OS on an older machine like that. It will boot and run slow as molasses, particularly on a platter-based hard drive.

Stick with 10.8.5 "Mountain Lion" instead. It will run better and you will be MUCH happier.

There are ways to find ML if you need it. Can't say more about that here.

Also -- if the MBPro still has a spinning hard drive, consider replacing it with an SSD. I put one in mine and it now runs BETTER THAN "new". You can find an online guide on how to do the swap at ifixit.com. BE SURE TO BUY AND USE THE CORRECT TOOLS! (shouting intentional). You'll need a Phillips #00 screwdriver and a Torx T-6.

Then take the old hard drive, buy a USB3 enclosure for about $18, put it in and use it as a backup drive...
 
Well, I've reinstalled Mavericks, though without erasing the copy that was on already.

I'm not sure if I would have been better erasing first.

At any rate, the machine is still booting slowly - by which I mean, 2 to 3 minutes from power on. As the above poster said, could this just be the slowness of Mavericks on my machine, or is it likely to be something else?

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For further info, the part of the boot with the swirly probably lasts about 1 minute, and then there is 1 to 2 minutes where it just sits there with the Apple logo not doing anything.
 
DangerousDave2k said:
Well, I've reinstalled Mavericks, though without erasing the copy that was on already.

I'm not sure if I would have been better erasing first.

At any rate, the machine is still booting slowly - by which I mean, 2 to 3 minutes from power on. As the above poster said, could this just be the slowness of Mavericks on my machine, or is it likely to be something else?

----------

For further info, the part of the boot with the swirly probably lasts about 1 minute, and then there is 1 to 2 minutes where it just sits there with the Apple logo not doing anything.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a HDD failure.

Upgrade to an SSD, then watch it boot in 15 seconds.
 
DangerousDave2k said:
Well, I've reinstalled Mavericks, though without erasing the copy that was on already.

I'm not sure if I would have been better erasing first.

At any rate, the machine is still booting slowly - by which I mean, 2 to 3 minutes from power on. As the above poster said, could this just be the slowness of Mavericks on my machine, or is it likely to be something else?

----------

For further info, the part of the boot with the swirly probably lasts about 1 minute, and then there is 1 to 2 minutes where it just sits there with the Apple logo not doing anything.
Click to expand...

Mavericks doesn't like HDDs. My Mini 2010 and my white Macbook run Mavericks as modern machines with SSDs.
 
I've had a lot of Sata cords go out. Before they went all the way out it would boot slower, misc other quirks. I have a mid 2010 13" 7,1
 
Ok so, slapped in a new 500GB 5400rpm HDD.

Now it's taking about 50 seconds to boot from the appearance of the logo. Is this still slower than it should be?
 
And now I've reinstalled Mavericks from a wiped drive on the original HDD, and that's also starting from scratch in 45 seconds.

Anybody know what might be going on here?
 
That sounds normal for a 5400 RPM HDD, I think? I haven't used a system with an HDD in a long time, but I definitely recall the boot times on my 2010 MBP being horrible before I switched.
 
Yeah, it seems about there now. I'm just wondering why it might have become so slow before the wipe and reinstall. Should I be looking out for a sneaky HDD issue or could it have been to do with the things that had been installed on it?
 
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