Macbook Air mid-2012 very slow startup

[spikie]

I have a 13 inch mid-2012 MBA, and when I boot up it hangs on the screen with an apple logo and a spinning gear wheel for about 3 minutes.
After then, it boots up and works normally. OS X 10.8 is installed on it.
What can cause this issue and how do I resolve it?

 

[Daniva]

Disconnect all attached devices.
1) In System Preferences select Startup Disk, in the next window select the disk icon if not marked in light blue color, then press the restart button.
2) If it doesn't solve your problem, check the items that automatically open at login in System Preferences, Users & Groups, Login items.
3) You can try to find some adware "unintentionally" installed, using the Adware Medic tool from Malwarebytes.org

p.s. your MBA can be upgraded to OS X Yosemite 10.10 for free

 

[Alex8]

I had this on my 2009 Mac book Air. The problem is that the laptop is doing a full fsck each time you boot. You can check this by holding down Command-V on boot. You should see the command File System Check taking a long time.

What I found was that there was a program or file that was causing the shutdown to be dirty and causing a file system check on restart. From research I tracked it down to tools installed by Western Digital WDDriveUtilityHelper and WDSecurityHelper.

See this link for more details ... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4831564?start=15&tstart=0

Hope this is your solution too!

 

[motrek]

I had this on my 2009 Mac book Air. The problem is that the laptop is doing a full fsck each time you boot. You can check this by holding down Command-V on boot. You should see the command File System Check taking a long time.

What I found was that there was a program or file that was causing the shutdown to be dirty and causing a file system check on restart. From research I tracked it down to tools installed by Western Digital WDDriveUtilityHelper and WDSecurityHelper.

See this link for more details ... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4831564?start=15&tstart=0

Hope this is your solution too!

Blech. I wouldn't install any software that comes with an external drive.