Sometimes it takes too long to restart, what gives?

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I have a newish 24' iMac 2.8. Everything works fine. I recently purchased a WD 1TB MyBook Studio Edition external drive. It's hooked up all the time using the FW 800 port for Time Machine.

Sometimes the Mac takes 2 to 3 minutes or more booting up, it just hangs on the blue screen right after the gray screen with the spinny gear and before the desktop.

The iMac usually takes about 25 seconds from the button press to the desktop.

I can't help to think that it has something to do with the external drive being connected. It's quite random. Sometimes when it restarts, the disk is not mounted and I have to disconnect the FW cable and reconnect it again to get it to mount, there is no device removal dialog if you are wondering.

Anyone else have similar issues?

And also on a side note, it also takes a while to shutdown, mostly when Transmission was still running right before shutting down
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
For starters go to System Preferences, assuming your are using some version of Leopard, Accounts and check Start Up items and make sure nothing is selected that will slow down your boot process.
 
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MacMini 14.3, 8.1 & 4.1, OS 13.5, 10.14, & 10.11 & 10.6; Macbook Pro 8.2, OS 10.12.
Sometimes the Mac takes 2 to 3 minutes or more booting up ... I can't help to think that it has something to do with the external drive being connected.

I think you can put a ring around that. I've had similar issues with my eMac and its peripherals for many months now.

Macs are wonderful computers but the system is terribly precious about proper unmount and shutdown procedures. If it's not done just-so, then on restart the computer goes looking everywhere for the additional hardware it was connected to at the previous session - but not always! :Confused:

Sometimes I shut down the computer without first ejecting the external hard drive for example. Then I might remember later, and switch off the ehd and unplug it. On restart, the Mac still goes looking for the ehd that was connected the previous day, but again - not always!

All I can suggest is that you go through the strictly-correct drag-to-trash or R-click-Eject procedure. Oh, and don't rush to unplug the peripheral item after its icon has disappeared from the desktop, especially after a first-time-in-session eject.

there is no device removal dialog if you are wondering.

Do you even get that with Firewire? I know it's so with USB.
 
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Yes hugh firewire likes to have the external drive icon dragged to the trash prior to disconnecting same as USB.
 

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