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Help!!! Really slow boot times after clean install (factory Restore).

A

Alfieg

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 5, 2011
215
265
Hi guys, hope you can help me here.

I followed apple's own instructions for a clean install. I booted from the USB restore disk. First I ran Disk utility to erase the current volume. Then I just did a normal install.

When I do this the macbook air takes around 1 minute to boot, with the loading circle animation rotating 16 times. Prior to restore it was 1.5 times.

Now I have tried restoring the same way a few times since and it does the same thing. I have also left the system idle and restarted it multiple times to see if it will "bed in" but it stays just as bad!

Does anyone on here know why this might be?

Thanks in advance.
 
Have you selected your drive as start up volume from System Preferences > Startup disk? You can also try SMC and PRAM resets.
 
Thanks for the tip. Can you tell me more about smc and pram? What do I need to do?

Cheers
 
Thanks. Any negatives associated with resetting PRAM and SMC?
 
your clock might get reset until your wifi connects again (won't affect the wifi itself), and your brightness/audio settings might change from when you turned it off. benefits outweigh the costs by a huge amount if your computer is being slow and this fixes it.
 
I suggest you just live with it for a couple of days. When I installed an SSD into my MBP, the boot time actually increased for a couple weeks. My apps still launched lightning fast, but the boot time just baffled me. After a while though, all of a sudden, my boot time cut by about 3 x. I'm guessing the system just does some maintenance work and eventually gets used to it. If you're still getting 1 min boot times after a month, take it to Apple as it might be a hardware issue. In the meantime, I'm sure waking from sleep is still fairly fast right? Why are you always shutting down the computer anyway?
 
When you used Disk Utility to erase the drive, did you activate the "security erase - zero all date" option? That might have caused a slow down of the drive until the controller could do its clean-up routine.

-howard
 
suggest you go again, this time:

* run hardware test first - hold down 'd' key as you start up from usb stick.

* then restart holding down the 'c' key and select a more secure erase option in disk utility.

something's definitely not as it should be. :(

when you get around to the actual Mac OSX install, deselect everything you don't need in the 'customise' section

let us know how you get on …
 
Fixed it. You're not going to believe me but I opened photo booth then restarted. went from 1 minute to 10 seconds and seems to be staying that way!

Riddle me that!!!!
 
Alfieg said:
Fixed it. You're not going to believe me but I opened photo booth then restarted. went from 1 minute to 10 seconds and seems to be staying that way!

Riddle me that!!!!
Click to expand...

We just came home with an 11" for my son. My wife has the identical one. Her's boots in 15 seconds. My sons boots in 40 seconds. No matter what we try we can't get it to boot faster. His old macbook is as fast with 5400 spin drive. Anyone have any ideas before we return it?
 
teerexx52 said:
We just came home with an 11" for my son. My wife has the identical one. Her's boots in 15 seconds. My sons boots in 40 seconds. No matter what we try we can't get it to boot faster. His old macbook is as fast with 5400 spin drive. Anyone have any ideas before we return it?
Click to expand...

Do a fresh install with a Secure erase. Regular Formats are bad for SSDs and can degrade performance.
 
teerexx52 said:
I tried it and it seemed to work until I used Super Duper to copy over my stuff. Then back to where I was. Slow boot.
Click to expand...

If it slows down after you move your old data back on, more than likely some system file got messed up somewhere down the line. The easiest thing to do is simply wipe the drive, do a clean OS install, then manually reinstall the software from before and move the data back. Super duper or any cloning utility will easily just copy the bad system files back over, defeating the purpose of your wipe.
 
hfg said:
The OS X standard "Disk Utility" can erase (zero out) free space.
Click to expand...

Stupid idea on an SSD. Zero-ing out a drive writes data to every block. To secure erase an SSD, you want to empty every block. Completely opposite effect.
 
axu539 said:
Stupid idea on an SSD. Zero-ing out a drive writes data to every block. To secure erase an SSD, you want to empty every block. Completely opposite effect.
Click to expand...

SO............ How do you empty out the blocks on an SSD?
 
axu539 said:
Stupid idea on an SSD. Zero-ing out a drive writes data to every block. To secure erase an SSD, you want to empty every block. Completely opposite effect.
Click to expand...

Yes, I completely agree. However, the poster asked for a way to wipe the free space on his drive, and that is one way to do it. I think it has been suggested on the forums that eventually the ssd controller will empty that zeroed-out free space resulting in the desired effect. Too bad we don't have a "trim" command to do it instantly.
 
You might as well just boot into linux using a USB and do a secure erase command. Shouldn't take much longer than a zero-ing out.
 
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