Super Slow Restart...and more

[Halcyon]

I'm having issues with the dreaded Beach Ball of death.

This is going on with two of my Mac's (iMac and MacBook) and it started practically at the same time on both...so I'm rulling out any kind of HD failure to be.

Upon Starting up, Restarting or Relaunching the Finder, it takes for ever (about 6 min.) to complete the rebooting process (gray screen > blue screen > login window > wallpaper). It does get to the wallpaper, loads the menu bar and everything else, then I have to let the machine sit there for another 5 minutes or so for the Finder to finish loading and doing all its stuff, before the machine can be used. Afterwards, all is fine, everything runs fine even under intensive task usage...with an ocasional beach ball here and there.

I've tried about everything in the book: restart, repair permission, zap Pram, run fsck from Treminal, rebbot in Safe-Mode (in which everything works like it should, with no long delays while starting up).

Short of reinstalling the system I don't know what else to try. I don't know how troublesome it can get to reinstall the system, as my original disks are an early version of 10.5 and I have lots of apps, plugins and add-ons that only run on 10.5.8 (like Safari)...so if I did that, would Ihave to reinstall all of them? Or could I get away with installing 10.5.4 and combo updating to 10.5.8 and not having to reinstall all the other apps and such? Wow, how about security updates, java updates, etc....what a drag!!!!

I'm open for suggestions.

TIA

 

[42streetsdown]

i had trouble with long reboots once. I just did a reinstall of the OS and it fixed it. i know that's a pretty extreme route to take, but it'll probably fix your problem.

 

[Jagardn]

My guess would be something in your "login items" or a service that is chewing up resources.
I would think if it were hardware related, that it would happen in safe mode too.

Have you tried holding Command + v for booting in verbose mode? You may possibly be able to see where it is hanging up.

You can probably also check your logs, you may see a big lag in system events during startup since every line is time stamped.

 

[Halcyon]

I will check my logs.

I've disabled all automatic logins in Preferences > Accounts > Login Items...don't know of any other place to do this.

At one point, soon after restarting, I was running Activity Monitor and I got a long beach ball delay and Actvity Monitor showed it was the Finder.

Starting up in Verbose Mode and see what info I can get from there.

I'm pretty sure that reinstalling system software will solve the problem, but; first, I barely shut of my machines and being that once they get going everything is fine...secondly, I'm on 10.5.8 so I'll wait for 10.7 to come out and skip SL.

Read on another thread that a guy solved the same exact problem by "reblessing" his HD (details a command line to run in Terminal), but he was on 10.4 on a G4 machine....anybody heard of this, can it be done on 10.5.8?

Thanks guys.