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Long boot up sequence

jonnysods

jonnysods

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 20, 2006
8,798
7,459
There & Back Again
Hey all, I have the latest Nehalem 2.66 Quad, and I have a bit of an issue with boot up speeds. When I press the power button it takes around 30+ seconds every single time for me to even hear the start up chime, followed by the grey screen. Once this starts it goes into it's boot sequence.

I don't have anything attached to the machine, I do have additional RAM (OWC ram, 2gb in each slot), and I have two drives placed in the machine (same specs as the stock HDD).

Anyone else getting this problem? It's nothing major, just a pain really. Plus my wife makes fun of me for shelling out $3500 for something that boots slower than our 3 year old iMac! Yes, she laughs at me, and I need to get this thing booting faster so I can laugh back at her!
 
Startup time had been a disappointment for me. I have the same thing you describe. Don't know of any solution. See signature for my Mac Pro.
 
Yeah, it's making me crazy! If it's the hard drives it don't make no sense. It's designed to house extra drives. Sigh. My old G4 eMac boots faster than my new MP!
 
I never shut mine down, but when I do restart, I agree it is painfully slow :eek:

Are these only the Nehalems?
 
I replaced the 3 X 1GB with 3 X 4GB ram modules and added 3 WD Caviar Black 1TB HD's and I didn't notice any added time from the original configuration.
 
I don't mean to be a prick, but is startup time really that important? How often do you do a cold powerup on your machine every day?
 
grue said:
I don't mean to be a prick, but is startup time really that important?
Click to expand...

It doesn't sound right that it takes 30s to get a startup chime.
I wouldn't be bothered by the amount of time wasted. I would
be more concerned about what may be causing the delay than
the delay itself. There might not be a serious problem, but I'd
at least like to know why it's happening.
 
Yeah I have to agree, the boot times are quite horrendous. Of course I don't shut down unless I have to.
 
jonnysods said:
Hey all, I have the latest Nehalem 2.66 Quad, and I have a bit of an issue with boot up speeds. When I press the power button it takes around 30+ seconds every single time for me to even hear the start up chime, followed by the grey screen. Once this starts it goes into it's boot sequence.

I don't have anything attached to the machine, I do have additional RAM (OWC ram, 2gb in each slot), and I have two drives placed in the machine (same specs as the stock HDD).

Anyone else getting this problem? It's nothing major, just a pain really. Plus my wife makes fun of me for shelling out $3500 for something that boots slower than our 3 year old iMac! Yes, she laughs at me, and I need to get this thing booting faster so I can laugh back at her!
Click to expand...

The delay could be cause by the system do it's hardware checks on powerup; such as checking it's ram for errors, awaiting for the hard-drive smart reports etc. I dunno what's the minimum ram required to boot on a 2009MP but, you could verify this by removing some memory and booting with the minimum.

BTW... Why do you always shut down your workstation?
What's wrong with using it's sleep mode? Consume too much power?
 
See my Nehalem in the Signature. I got 3x 1TB Caviar Black harddiscs in RAID0 and my Mac Pro is booting up slow too. It doesn't take so long, but long enough !
 
I don't restart often but when I do it takes between 45 seconds and 1 minute to get to the login screen.

I was assuming it was the RAID 1 Volume that was slowing things down. UltraNEO could have a good point though since I do have 32GB of RAM for it to check on start up.
 
What's wrong with shutting down my computer? Just because others leaves theirs on for a long period of time, doesn't mean that I have to. I'll do what I want with my machine thank you. For the record, I turn my machine off once a week, and restart it sometimes for patches, boot camp etc.

All I want to know is - even if I start my machine up once a year, or 50 times a year - why does a high end machine take 30-45 seconds just to get the grey screen?

I'm glad I'm not alone at least!
 
Infrared said:
It doesn't sound right that it takes 30s to get a startup chime.
I wouldn't be bothered by the amount of time wasted. I would
be more concerned about what may be causing the delay than
the delay itself. There might not be a serious problem, but I'd
at least like to know why it's happening.
Click to expand...
I'd think anyone would. :)

UltraNEO* said:
The delay could be cause by the system do it's hardware checks on powerup; such as checking it's ram for errors, awaiting for the hard-drive smart reports etc. I dunno what's the minimum ram required to boot on a 2009MP but, you could verify this by removing some memory and booting with the minimum.
Click to expand...
Could be the case. But as the issue isn't in Leopard, what did they change? :confused:

UltraNEO* said:
BTW... Why do you always shut down your workstation?
What's wrong with using it's sleep mode? Consume too much power?
Click to expand...
The OP gave an answer, but in my case at least, it's heat output. It can't sleep with a RAID card in it, and the system thermal output can heat the room to about 84F. T

Though I've a window AC installed to help, I don't like to run it that much.
1. It's on the same circuit (I haven't gotten around to running a separate line due to the difficulty involved. Exterior wall, and it's not a gable end).
2. Power consumption.
 
nanofrog said:
Could be the case. But as the issue isn't in Leopard, what did they change?

The OP gave an answer, but in my case at least, it's heat output. It can't sleep with a RAID card in it, and the system thermal output can heat the room to about 84F. T

Though I've a window AC installed to help, I don't like to run it that much.
1. It's on the same circuit (I haven't gotten around to running a separate line due to the difficulty involved. Exterior wall, and it's not a gable end).
2. Power consumption.
Click to expand...

OP doesn't say which version of the OS he/she is running..

Man that's fairly warm, great for the winter i suppose. ;) Well, I had the exact problem when I first got my CalDigit RaidCard, thankfully they provided a firmware update, now it sleeps like a baby. I tried booting from RAID is super slow... power up, wait for raid card to initialise then it goes to boot!! Adds another 10~20s to the boot speed. lol

From experience Apple never provide or use high performance drives in their machines. So when ever i get a new system, the first thing out is their crappy basic drive.. replace with something faster offering high performance. I do wonder how fast the OP's machine would boot if it had a SSD for the system drive, would it still be slow???
 
jonnysods said:
Hey all, I have the latest Nehalem 2.66 Quad, and I have a bit of an issue with boot up speeds. When I press the power button it takes around 30+ seconds every single time for me to even hear the start up chime, followed by the grey screen. Once this starts it goes into it's boot sequence.

I don't have anything attached to the machine, I do have additional RAM (OWC ram, 2gb in each slot), and I have two drives placed in the machine (same specs as the stock HDD).

Anyone else getting this problem? It's nothing major, just a pain really. Plus my wife makes fun of me for shelling out $3500 for something that boots slower than our 3 year old iMac! Yes, she laughs at me, and I need to get this thing booting faster so I can laugh back at her!
Click to expand...

I don't know if this will help or not, but I just had a quite similar issue, and it all turned out to be because of *1* external drive I had hooked up via USB. (as soon as I took it out of the system, boot times returned completely to normal)

For me though, I would get the "chime" in the usual time, but it would then not start the real booting for 30s
 
UltraNEO* said:
OP doesn't say which version of the OS he/she is running..

Man that's fairly warm, great for the winter i suppose. ;) Well, I had the exact problem when I first got my CalDigit RaidCard, thankfully they provided a firmware update, now it sleeps like a baby. I tried booting from RAID is super slow... power up, wait for raid card to initialise then it goes to boot!! Adds another 10~20s to the boot speed. lol

From experience Apple never provide or use high performance drives in their machines. So when ever i get a new system, the first thing out is their crappy basic drive.. replace with something faster offering high performance. I do wonder how fast the OP's machine would boot if it had a SSD for the system drive, would it still be slow???
Click to expand...
As for winter, that's what I'm hoping. :D

In this case, it's an Areca (boot is off the ARC-1231ML in this instance), and it's not too bad for intitialization (~45s). The ARC-1680 actually isn't that bad either. But I've seen cards take up to 1.5 minutes. :eek: S_L_O_W :p

SSD should make a significant difference, but matthewtoney may be right. Something that simple, the OP didn't think was an issue, and didn't mention on that line of thinking. Hopefully, this is in fact the case. :)
 
UltraNEO* said:
OP doesn't say which version of the OS he/she is running..

Man that's fairly warm, great for the winter i suppose. ;) Well, I had the exact problem when I first got my CalDigit RaidCard, thankfully they provided a firmware update, now it sleeps like a baby. I tried booting from RAID is super slow... power up, wait for raid card to initialise then it goes to boot!! Adds another 10~20s to the boot speed. lol
Click to expand...

:)

I was watching some booting videos on YouTube (how sad!) and I
noticed quite a few where the BIOS/RAID configuration took ages.

E.g., this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIxiOlbSNss

47 seconds to actually start loading the OS, then only 10 seconds
to the desktop after that.

Oh, I might as well throw this one in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIxiOlbSNss

XP booting in 5 seconds :)

Only if you ignore the BIOS delay, though, which some might consider
as cheating.
 
nanofrog said:
That being the case then, perhaps it's time to check the logs (SMART, memory,..), and go from there (i.e. pulling DIMM's,...). :rolleyes: :(
Click to expand...

Sounds good.

Hmm.. I wonder what happens if you power on with no drives connected.
 
Mine too

My quad Nehalem takes quite a while to chime from when I press the power button, 30 seconds sounds about right.
When I booted it for the first time, it made me think something was wrong, having come from a G4 which chimed as soon as you pressed the power button, but I've got used to it now.
I think this is normal for this model.
 
dryjoy said:
My quad Nehalem takes quite a while to chime from when I press the power button, 30 seconds sounds about right.
When I booted it for the first time, it made me think something was wrong, having come from a G4 which chimed as soon as you pressed the power button, but I've got used to it now.
I think this is normal for this model.
Click to expand...

What I want to know is this: Does the standard GeForce GT 120 card, upon startup, have the fan running full blast like the ATI Radeon HD 4870 card does?
 
It doesn't appear to be an OS thing, because it never boots to the OS until it does it's grey screen thing.

But just so you know, whatever the new Mac Pros came with (10.5.6 or whatever), that's what I've got.

I haven't installed SL yet, still holding out until some of my apps are patched, but I don't expect it to be fixed...
 
same here

i have the same problem with my MBP. it takes about 30s to get to the loading screen. i`m running windows 7. i tend to believe it's a firmware problem but i can't really update it because i don't have OSX installed. so you could try that and tell us if it worked.

cheers
 
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