We have a G5 which takes 10 minutes to boot up...

[moron]

I'm hoping that somebody will be able to shed some light on this, because I'm confused! My friend's 1.8ghz G5 takes about 10 minutes to boot up which, as you can probably imagine, is rather annoying. Also, it is prone to randomly stopping for a few minutes at a time before becoming active again, and it takes about 5 minutes to log in as a different user once you've logged out.

I've had a dig through the system logs, and during boot up there are 3 entries which say 'localhost mach_kernel disk0s9:0x3 (UNDEFINED)'. Each entry has a 3 minute gap between them, which I assume is what is causing the system to idle. I suspect that it could be to do with him plugging/unplugging usb and firewire drives (well, cameras and stuff like that), as it seems that the computer is looking for a drive which doesn't exist. I found a few mentions of diskxxxxx (UNDEFINED) on google, but nothing has been any help. One site suggested repairing privilages, which I've done...no joy though.

Is anyone familiar with this problem? How can I go about fixing it? Should I just reformat and start again?

Oh...he's using 10.2.8, and Norton Utilities are installed, if that makes any difference?

Cheers in advance!

mike

 

[cr2sh]

Should I just reformat and start again?

If its a new machine and you feel comfortabke doing this.. yeh, wipe it out and install the system disks again. It'll take an hour or so and before diagnosing a hardware problem, a fresh OS might be the best bet.

 

[yippy]

You also might want to run the Apple Hardware Test disk that came with the computer.

Have you installed any 3rd party ram? If you have, try taking it out. Sometimes it can cause problems if it is bad.

 

[fartheststar]

Oh...he's using 10.2.8, and Norton Utilities are installed, if that makes any difference?

Cheers in advance!

mike

Norton Utilities may be the problem. A lot of mac users, especially G5 / OSX users hate this product and have had a bunch of problems with it. My suggestion would be to NOT reinstall that program when you rebuild the computer. Antivirus fine (there's another debate about that) but don't USE the Norton Utilities. Use diskwarrior or apple's own disk software.

 

[Jo-Kun]

Norton Utilities may be the problem. A lot of mac users, especially G5 / OSX users hate this product and have had a bunch of problems with it.

I second that... it was hell on my Ti-Book... and I did not even bother to instal it on my G5... Speed disk & other utils did hang for a while and one day even made my harddisk unreadable for MacOSX... I had to format and reinstall everything...

thnx but no thnx Mr Norton... only to be used on OS9 (than it did work... but its an OSX-Trasher!!!)

 

[jared_kipe]

I would doubt it is a hardware problem, I'd do a format and install. Sometimes even the best operating systems can get some errors. You also might consider upgrading to panther 10.3 at the same time. Then your format and install time isn't entirely wasted. And in my opinion the new finder alone is worth the upgrade.

 

[fartheststar]

I would doubt it is a hardware problem, I'd do a format and install. Sometimes even the best operating systems can get some errors. You also might consider upgrading to panther 10.3 at the same time. Then your format and install time isn't entirely wasted. And in my opinion the new finder alone is worth the upgrade.

Unless you are made of money I would not pay for the upgrade to panther right now. Tiger will be just around the corner, sometime (probably) between January and June '05. There's "nothing wrong" with a typical properly installed version of Jaguar... unless you need the new OS for some newer software or features. If you don't, save your $129 for the next upgrade and you'll get a whole lot more with Tiger.