ibook taking WAY too long to boot

[QCassidy352]

just recently, my ibook 900 has started taking way too long to restart or boot up. (10.2.6) The grey screen with the spinning wheel appears for soooo long... a few minutes at least. It used to start or restart in probably a minute or less.

Anyone ever experienced this worsening of boot time? Any idea why this could be happening?

 

[Kwyjibo]

how often are you booting it? I mean I haven't all the way shut down my machine since i rebooted from that security update so the slow boot times dont' really bother me.

You shoudl probably consider sleeping the machine more than rebooting it.

 

[jxyama]

kwijibo-

i understand your point, but it still doesn't address the issue. long load time is a problem and simply circumventing it is not a solution...

Q-
try booting your machine while holding down open apple-S. that will get you into the single user mode. you might want to run check disk too, by typing "fsck -y" at the prompt. (when done, type reboot) i don't know how else you can make the boot up faster, but it will give you an idea of what it's doing while booting...

 

[iJon]

yeah same with my powerbook 12 inch. its slow as hell. luckily putting panther on here it boots up almost as fast as my powermac. the only problem is is that it isnt always consistent. it will boot fast one time, then slower the next.

iJon

 

[NavyIntel007]

Booting in any *nix flavor is slow. Apple is not excluded from this. BSD was made to leave running for years with no downtime. It was not made to shutdown and restart all the time. I've heard rumors that Panther is suppose to boot faster but it won't be much faster. Just put your laptop to sleep when you aren't using it.

 

[Daveman Deluxe]

I agree with previous comments about starting up in single-user mode and running fsck. A long boot time is a good sign of disk errors. The added time in your boot is most likely being spent checking the disk to see if something is wrong.

The same thing happens if you need to force-restart the computer. Since it was not shut down properly, the disk check runs.

My plan of action for my iBook: during the day I leave it asleep, but when I'm done for the night, I turn the thing off. Regardless of what anybody says, it's perfectly OK to shut the iBook down (and I see good reason to do so). Anybody who tells you otherwise has bought into Steve Jobs' notion that "real men don't shut down."

 

[Kwyjibo]

Would a simple solution be repairing the permissions to see if that helps the load time?


I'm not really circumventing the issue at hand I'm offering a good reason why it should not be an issue.

As for the sleep v. shutdown debate, I'm not going to win but I know that for both *nix systems and even Windows Xp its recommended to sleep rather than shut down for various reasons.
1) the hardware and disks wear down more when they are required to shut all the way down and spin all the way bacck up rather than just sleeping the machine.
2) internal mac parts are expensive and sometiems hard to find, i've read quite a few discussions about older macs esepcially the crt imacs ahving failing powerboards after a few years. That sounds like an expesnive repair for stubborness.

agian i cant' stop anyone from causing themsleves more stress i can only offer my suggestions. disk permissions are your best bet if you feel compelled to restart/shutdown alot jsut be aware of the damage your causing to your machine may be equal or greater to sleeping the machine. oh yeah i'm nto buying into job's notion. I'm drawing int othe genreal trend of ALL major modern operationg systems.

 

[zimv20]

occasionally (and yesterday is the latest example), my ibook takes upwards of 4 minutes to boot. usually it takes a little over a minute.

i believe that the system, for whatever reason, is doing an fsck. i booted it last night on a plane, after the ibook had spent a good amount of time being jostled to and w/in the airport. perhaps that triggered it? perhaps it's on a schedule.

today, it booted normally.

 

[crazzyeddie]

Originally posted by Kwyjibo

As for the sleep v. shutdown debate, I'm not going to win but I know that for both *nix systems and even Windows Xp its recommended to sleep rather than shut down for various reasons.
1) the hardware and disks wear down more when they are required to shut all the way down and spin all the way bacck up rather than just sleeping the machine.

Uh, when you sleep the machine, the hard drives spin down the same way as when you shut down... Same goes for the hard drive sleep function while the comp is still on.

 

[janey]

sometimes my iBook would have taken upwards of 15 minutes to boot, but I later realized that was because of fsck so i enabled journaling...
my iBook, along with all my other computers, spend about 1 minute to restart thanks to panther...

 

[QCassidy352]

Originally posted by übergeek
sometimes my iBook would have taken upwards of 15 minutes to boot, but I later realized that was because of fsck so i enabled journaling...

sorry, but can you explain that further please?

As to those who suggest sleeping it... well, that's not really the issue. Sleeping may be the better way to do it, but the point is that something has gone wrong with this machine since it used to boot quickly. So even if I just sleep it, I want to know what has gotten messed up...

I will try single user mode and let you know how it works out. Thanks for the help everyone, keep the ideas coming.

 

[QCassidy352]

update:
ok, so I repaired permissions and also booted in to single user mode. There were some permissions to be fixed, but fsck -y didn't find any problems.

Rebooting still takes way too long, by which I mean way longer than it used to. Any other ideas would be much appreciated.

 

[mico]

Here's a suggestion if you have not already tried it. I recently tried to mirror 2 firewire hard drives in disk utility and failed with each attempt. Did mac janitor , did fsck -y, then went to repair disk permissions and it went crazy with a whole stream of text moving very fast in the permissions window with some text saying that alot of permissions were not allowed. Called up apple tech support with my new applecare purchase regarding my mirroring problem - after 15 min. I was told firewire drives might not be supported for mirroring. Tech support suggested getting a third party raid software but I decided to repair disk permissions with the install os X disk. Repaired, then rebooted. Went to disk utility - repaired disk permissions- no more crazy text and mirroring took 2 seconds without problem. So I would repair disk permission off the disk and see if that makes it snappier - it did that and much more for my Ti.

 

[bennetsaysargh]

th same thing has happened with my 400Mhz iMac. any help would be apreciated by me too.
it usualy gets put to sleep, but on re-boots, it takes about 5 minutes just to get past the grey apple screen, then another minute to get through the startup screen.