Slow boot and disks missing

[andrema2]

Hi,

I'm new to Macs. I have an iMac with 6 external disks. One of then is fw800 and the 5 others are usb and they are connected to the i
mac using a usb hub. The boot process takes a very long time between black screen and white screen. After that when the system is loading it loads normally. Why does it take so long ?

To make things worse, some of the disks doesn't appear on Leopard at all. If I boot on Vista they show up fine. I have tested the disks on Vista and they seem fine. All disks are NTFS.

Any ideas ?

 

[andrema2]

Any thoughts ?

 

[JediMeister]

Generally, booting with so many connected drives forces the system to scan each one for a bootable operating system. You will sometimes notice the same effect if you leave an iPod plugged in when starting up the an Apple computer. If you unplug the drives and only connect after its loaded into the operating system things should be fine. As far as the drives not showing up in Finder, I'm not really sure what could account for that as even though Mac OS X can't write to the NTFS drives, it ought to be able to show them in Finder...

 

[misterredman]

I would try booting without the drives and then adding one at a time to see if any doesn't show up. if one of them doesn't leave it disconnected but connect the others and boot again. Does it still take so long?
I am wondering if it is not that the OS has a problem reading one of the drives, causing it to take so long to boot.