What happened to my zippy G5?????

[NanoBite]

My G5 is only about 2 mths new and already it's taking ages longer to start.

It get's to the cloudy screen with the spinning cog and stays there for 15+ secs where it would only momentarily stay there when I first started using it.

When my desktop appears it takes a while for the info to the upper right to appear.

I know the more you use your computer the longer it takes to start, but....the computer is only 2mths into its life.....!

Don't have much extra installed on it in such a short time of ownership....only Eyetv with about 10gig of recorded stuff.

I have the 2.0Ghz G5 10.4.3, with the base amounts of ram etc.

I was told to run a utility called Disk Utility (DU from now on) and I did and it hasn't made any difference.

If I run the DU and it fixes what it finds, then if I run it again should it eventually stop finding things?

It always shows the same things needing fixing.

In DU in the panel on the left it says WDC WD2500JD-40HBC0 and under that it says Macintosh HD....well I have selected both to scan but I still get the same stuff coming up each time.

So in summarizing:

My 2mth old G5 is taking longer to boot,

What can I do about it?

What is the difference between running DU on : WDC WD2500JD-40HBC0 OR : Macintosh HD?

Each time I run DU should it show the same list of things that need fixing/were fixed?

Thanks in advance.

 

[christm]

i have the same problem with my ibook g4, i need a fix!

email me if you have the answer

thanks

christm (at) lycos.co.uk

 

[lil]

WDC WD2500JD-40HBC0 is your entire hard disk.

Macintosh HD is a single segment or partition of your hard disk.

It is possible if you were to reduce the size of the Macintosh HD partition to not occupy all of the hard disk's space you could create more partitions, say 'Backup' or 'Photos' etc. which physically looks like another hard disk but really is a seperate location on the same hard disk.

Running Disk Utility on WDC... will check the whole hard disk.

Running Disk Utility on Macintosh HD will only check that partition.

Disk Utility when 'repairing' will also verify and repair permissions that Mac OS X sets on some files (it's the way a UNIX system like itself does things) and sometimes these get scrambled and need correcting. Some however will always flag a warning but there isn't anything particularly wrong.

Permission refer to flags on a file known as Read, Write and Execute. When Read is set you can potentially read the file or view it. When write is set you can make changes and when Execute is set if it's an application you can run it. Further to this though there are 3 other groups: owner, group and other. If you imagine a 3 x 3 matrix with read, write, execute at the top for the columns and the rows being owner, group and other.

Files marked with say a flag in the read, write and execute boxes for the owner means the person who created the file can do those 3 things. If there is a read flag and no others for the group entity, then anyone who falls into the creator's or owner's group say:

Mitchell created it, they are the owner. They are a member of the group 'Staff'.
Alan is not the owner, he is a member of the group 'Staff'.
Emma is not the owner, she is a member of the group 'Executives'.

If Mitchell tries to access the file, they will be able to read, write and execute it as they are the owner.

If Alan tried to access the file they will be able to view it but not make any changes to it or run it; as they are not the owner but are in the same group as Mitchell.

If for 'Other', none of the read, write and execute flags are marked, then anyone who isn't the owner (Mitchell) or of their group (Staff) cannot access the file to read, write or execute it. So Emma cannot view it, it's just as well, it's a less than complimentary joke picture that was circulating the office :flower:

Sometimes these permissions can cause problems, such as a file downloaded or from another computer that names another owner or group that does not exist on this local machine, or in further context an OS 9 application has been installed. Problem is most Mac OS 9 and earlier apps install as 'root' and root is the superuser, the all powerful being and really, you should not have files marked as root ownership.

It's quite complicated but it does generally work better than the Windows way of doing this as you will notice the lack of attacks compromising UNIX systems like Mac OS X.

(Just in case your unaware, Mac OS X's foundation is based on Berkeley-System-Distribution or BSD, which is a UNIX variant, but *not* a Linux variant as that is similar to look at and superficially structure wise but different system under the hood.)

To read more about permissions and mac OS X,
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106712

Also second way to sort this maybe:

Have you gone into System Preferences > Accounts, click on the Login Items tab and checked if there are too many programs being loaded on start up?

You may have an OS 9 app starting on log in meaning OS X is booting Classic which takes time...

Thirdly,

Restart your Mac and hold down command + s and hold it down till you get the black boot screen with white text, welcome to the guts of OS X :flower: Don't panic. We're going to run fsck which stands for filesystemcheck - does what Disk Utility does but does a better job. At the prompt type:

fsck -fy <ENTER>

That means press enter, not type it! This will run a more thorough check and repair, it may spit up some incurable errors, run it again, it can take 2-3 passes but bear in mind the permissions thing.

When this is done, type:

exit <ENTER>

And things will boot as normal.

Fourthly,

Consider getting Onyx. Mac OS X runs its maintenance scripts by itself but Onyx can prompt it to do them when you want and fix a number of other things. This should not need to be done in all honesty as OS X is pretty on the ball for doing this.

--

How long does your Mac take to boot and ready to use, my PowerBook G4 from the point of log in only takes around 15-20 seconds maybe tops, I have never timed it mind, and probably about 45 seconds from switching on to login.

How much RAM do you have, 512?

Vicky

 

[NanoBite]

Thanks for your great post, Vicky. I won't worry about Onyx and my Mac takes about the same as your PBG4.

I have the base amount of Ram which I guess is 512.