VERY long startup times

Lately I've started having very long startup times, although the length of startup is not consistent. Sometimes the apple logo comes up, then it starts loading stuff. From pressing power button to a usable desktop this takes 45-60 and 1.5 minutes when I reload my previous session which is fair enough.

Then there are days where I press the power button and the iMac would just stand there with a white screen for a while. Usually at this point I'll hear both internal and external hard disks start to spin, but when it gets stuck on the apple logo, the hard disks start to spin one by one and there is a long delay between each other. The internal (startup) hard disk is the last one to spin up. After they spin up, I get the blue screen and it stops there again, but this time I can hear the hard disks loading stuff. Then it lets me enter my password and I can start using apps the second it logs me in.

I have 2 self powered 1TB external hard disks, one is a seagate and is split in 250GB for time machine and 750GB for everything else. This partition is empty thus far. The other is also another 1TB Samsung and contains the iTunes library and some general storage files. There is also an 8GB pen drive attached via usb hub (also with its own power supply) All 3 storage devices have been formatted by disk utility using hfs+

Verifying the disks says everything is ok, and these are the login items I've got:


the internal hard disk is also set up to be the startup disk:


edit: completely unrelated, but is anyone having problems with youtube videos on safari? mine keep locking up the browser, stop buffering half way through, skip a ton of frames etc

Try Apple Hardware Test:
Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

alcom4x said:

Then there are days where I press the power button and the iMac would just stand there with a white screen for a while. Usually at this point I'll hear both internal and external hard disks start to spin, but when it gets stuck on the apple logo, the hard disks start to spin one by one and there is a long delay between each other. The internal (startup) hard disk is the last one to spin up.

Click to expand...

Sounds like the Mac is cycling through the disks, trying to boot from them one after the other. For some reason, it's starting with the external drives and then working its way to the internal. Try ensuring that your external drives are disconnected when you go to power up.

thanks, I will try both suggestions. Still does this mean that I have to disconnect/reconnect my external drives every time I turn on the system?

Try it first as a test. If the problem stops because of this, you'll know that the Mac is searching those disks first. If that's the case, yes, you'll have to remount them after OS X is booted (since, as far as I know, there is no way to specify what devices are scanned first).

The start up disk normally used is written in nvram .
So the MAC should know from which disk to start up.
The command nvram - p
Give among others the name of the start up disk .
If the name is not there it might be use full to rest the nvram after restarting from the start up disk first .