iMac taking forever to boot

Hi all,

I have a summer 2010 iMac (8GB Ram, 3.2 i3) which I have been using for about 6 months.

Whenever I boot from an off state, the desktop comes up with a couple of minutes but then the HDD keeps accessing for about 15-20 minutes. During this time, the Mac is pretty much unusable as even opening Safari takes over a minute. After the approx. 20 minutes, everything calms down and the machine works as speedy as ever.

Coming from a PC background I am well used to windows getting bloated over time with each new application installed etc... is this the same for Mac OSX?

Is there anything I can do that will help? Defragging doesn't seem to be a part of Mac OSX.

Anyway... any information to help with my novice mac ability would be greatly received.

Regards and thanks in advance.

Welcome to Mac-Forums
It certainly shouldn't be taking that long to access the HDD, usually this occurs on a dying HDD.
As it is still under Apple Care I would make an appointment at your closest Apple Store for them to look at it, they may replace/ take away for repairs.

HTH
- Simon

Many thanks for the feedback.

I originally thought it may be the HDD. Weird thing is, it only 'chunters along' after the desktop has come up (which happens relatively quickly). After the 15 mins of 'chuntering' everything is fine and all disk access is as fast as ever.

It is almost like it is trying to start up lots of processes on boot.

Do Mac's do lots of system checking, looking for updates, etc on boot that coud be causing this? Maybe it is purely down the the number of apps i have installed (my 1TB HDD has about 500gb left).

Best Regards,
Matt.

You can have a look at what is starting up on boot, and minus "-" as much as possible by going to System Preference > Accounts > Login Items

HTH
- Simon

You could also take a look at Activity Monitor when it's doing this in case there's something taking up all your RAM. I found this with Quicksilver and another program (can't remember which). I deleted them, and everything was fine after that.

But, as Buzzard2010 says, it might be the disk, so back up.

Are you the Martin Sketchley that wrote Affinity Trap?

- Simon

Er... with some trepidation I'll admit to that, yes.

I liked it, read it the other day, weird coincidence! but thanks for the book

- Simon

fallingbrickwor said:

Is there anything I can do that will help? Defragging doesn't seem to be a part of Mac OSX.

Click to expand...

I would first run all of the recommend routine maintenance suggested here:

OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting

If that doesn't help, I know that defragging the hard drive on a Macintosh is controversial, but I've found that after running the most comprehensive defragmentation option in iDefrag:

Coriolis Systems :: Products :: iDefrag

that my Mac acts like it is in a huge hurry to startup! Usually my Mac starts up and is ready to go in about 40 seconds flat.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

Hi again and thanks for everyone who took the time to respond.

After looking at the activity monitor it seems that 1 process is taking up all the cpu, disk activity etc...

mds process.

I will have to try and get to the bottom of this and see if it is something that could possibly be disabled.

Regards,
Matt.

"mds" and "mdimport" are Spotlight processes. If they are what is causing the slowdown, Spotlight probably has a corrupted database. To fix this you need to delete Spotlight's corrupted database, and have it create a new fresh one.

To do this, Open System Preferences (in the Apple menu) , choose the Spotlight panel, click on the Privacy tab, and drag your main drive's icon into the Privacy window. Now highlight your hard drive's icon within the Privacy window (by clicking on it once) and
click on the "-" (that is, the minus button in the Privacy Window).

Or you could highlight the hard drive icon in the Privacy window and hit the delete key.

This will cause the Spotlight database to be deleted and automatically rebuilt. (You won't be able to use Spotlight while its database is being rebuilt.).

After doing this, set your Mac so that it won't go to sleep, and leave your Mac on for the whole day, and allow Spotlight to index your entire drive uninterrupted.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________