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Booting is so slow: Mac OS X Snow Leopard

IndianSteveJobs

IndianSteveJobs

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 4, 2010
23
0
India
Hi,

I bought my MacBook Pro 7 months back nearly. It used to boot very fast. The time it takes to show the Login screen used to be less than 12 seconds. These days, it has become some 4o to 50 seconds.

Can anyone help me out to fast up the boot up process.

Note: :) I dont boot with already-inserted DVDs or USB Drives or Network Chords. Mac is stand alone. Mostly I boot up when powered on.

Thanks.Chandra
 
Check System Preferences to see if your hard drive is selected as the Startup Disk. Also, check System Preferences, Accounts, Login Items to see if there's anything there that you don't really need that can be disabled.
 
DewGuy1999 said:
Check System Preferences to see if your hard drive is selected as the Startup Disk. Also, check System Preferences, Accounts, Login Items to see if there's anything there that you don't really need that can be disabled.
Click to expand...

Yes, harddrive is start up disk.
There are no start up items. :(
But still.
Is there anything I can do like Defragmentation of HD. I dont know, OnyX is for that or not!
Help me!
 
IndianSteveJobs said:
...Defragmentation of HD...
Click to expand...

Assuming your filesystems are HFS+, then manual defragmentation is unnecessary, as the filesystem implementation itself does this automatically any time a file is opened.

Of course, if your disk is almost full then this process is going to break down...

At which stage does your boot slow down?
Grey screen? Light Blue screen?

Have you tried a verbose boot?

Spidey!!!
 
spidey3 said:
Assuming your filesystems are HFS+, then manual defragmentation is unnecessary, as the filesystem implementation itself does this automatically any time a file is opened.

Of course, if your disk is almost full then this process is going to break down...

At which stage does your boot slow down?
Grey screen? Light Blue screen?

Have you tried a verbose boot?

Spidey!!!
Click to expand...

Grey Screen.
 
First of all, your should definitely reset SMC and zap PRAM and try again to see if this helps.

That said, the grey screen is when the system is enumerating all of the attached devices. I would not be surprised if some device in your system is slow at responding.

I had a similar issue on my 2007 Mac Pro (long wait in grey screen), probably due to problems on my root filesystem [which was mounted via an Apple RAID Card]. I'm not 100% certain that this was the cause -- as before I could finish diagnosing it two of the four disks in the RAID 5 array failed completely within an hour of each other. I had get new disks, re-define the RAID sets / volumes, reinstall the OS from the install disk, and restore my data from backup. After doing that the problem no longer existed. It is my [unproven] assumption that the Apple RAID Card was taking a long time to respond on boot while it tried to deal with the two disks which were about to fail.

Also, just before my wife's MacBook's drive failed we saw similar long pauses at the grey screen.

But, I also saw long pauses at the grey screen when I had an [apparently broken] cheapo USB hub plugged in. They went away when I removed it.

So....

I suggest that you:
A) reset SMC and zap PRAM
B) Try booting with NO peripherals at all attached
C) Make sure you have a good backup of all of your data
D) Boot using the install disk and use Disk Utility to check / repair your boot disk

Spidey!!!
 
dmin7th said:
Just FYI:
I had similar boot behavior and was able to reduce my boot time by 22 seconds after reading this forum thread.
Click to expand...

thanks for the link..I did what was mentioned in that thread and it actualy seemed to improve the boot time AFTER the login screen (ie after typing in my password, everything popped up on my desktop almost immediately). It still takes forever (40-45 seconds) on the grey screen with the Apple logo on it though. (with no peripherals attached, etc). Actually, I think now the time to desktop is still the same because the grey screen takes even longer even though the blue screen improved..

THoughts?
 
Last edited:
archdelux said:
thanks for the link..I did what was mentioned in that thread and it actualy seemed to improve the boot time AFTER the login screen (ie after typing in my password, everything popped up on my desktop almost immediately). It still takes forever (40-45 seconds) on the grey screen with the Apple logo on it though. (with no peripherals attached, etc). Actually, I think now the time to desktop is still the same because the grey screen takes even longer even though the blue screen improved..

THoughts?
Click to expand...

This article won't make your bootup any faster, but will shed a little light on the bootup process and maybe give you an idea of something else to try...

TUAW.com: Mac 101: What's happening when your Mac is starting up?
 
archdelux said:
thanks for the link..I did what was mentioned in that thread and it actualy seemed to improve the boot time AFTER the login screen (ie after typing in my password, everything popped up on my desktop almost immediately). It still takes forever (40-45 seconds) on the grey screen with the Apple logo on it though. (with no peripherals attached, etc). Actually, I think now the time to desktop is still the same because the grey screen takes even longer even though the blue screen improved..

THoughts?
Click to expand...

bump.. any thoughts?

Now, it appears that it is booting up even slower.. maybe 120 seconds (2 minutes) to go from off to usable. Whatever I did to help the blue screen speed stopped working for some reason and that speed has gone back to what it used to be.. any help is appreciated!

P.S. THanks for the article. I certainly appreciate that a lot is going on when booting - what concerns me, however, is the fact that the speed keeps decreasing although nothing (that I can see) is changing..
 
archdelux said:
bump.. any thoughts?

Now, it appears that it is booting up even slower.. maybe 120 seconds (2 minutes) to go from off to usable. Whatever I did to help the blue screen speed stopped working for some reason and that speed has gone back to what it used to be.. any help is appreciated!

P.S. THanks for the article. I certainly appreciate that a lot is going on when booting - what concerns me, however, is the fact that the speed keeps decreasing although nothing (that I can see) is changing..
Click to expand...

Maybe something here:
C|net: MacFixit: Tutorial: Resolving slow startup: Speeding up Mac OS X boot time
 
it might be too late, but....

as I was having a similar problem (cause not sure its the same thing), I search google for answers and came across this thread amongst many others.

My issue was that the grey screen would take about 41 seconds to reach the dark apple and spinning clock thing. And I know that some time ago it would take 8-10 seconds to get the dark apple. And I wondered and wondered why. Until I searched and read some things today.

The solution that fix the grey screen with no apple for 40 seconds was going into SYSTEM PREFERENCES/START UP DISK and clicking and highlighting the disk to start up on. For some reason it got deselected, I think it was when I loaded the mac with a different OS disk to test or without one connected (both of which I have done in the past...opps) and that lead to the deselection of the start up disk in preferences, I'm guessing.

Anyways I was so excited that the fix was something so easy, that it took longer to register here on macrumors so I could maybe help others with this issue.

Thanks to all those who post here and all over net,
Oh Ye-AH!
 
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