10.11 El Capitan incredibly long to start ...?

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Good morning to all,

I have upgraded my 10.8 on an 2009 Imac which needed it to allow modern software to operate properly.
Strangley, sometimes it takes more than 20 minutes to boot after a cold start !
Sometimes it doe not, it will boot in seconds.It seems it is reconstrcting some data base somewhere.
When the boot progress bar has finished and is fully black, it will not open yet. I then have to kill it with the Power supply button and after this it will open normally, until the next day or so.
What is the problem ?
I have lost my wifi and all he 'fix it' advice I could find have been unsuccesfull. If there is no improvement with this boot problem I tink I will donwngrade to the good (vey) old faithful 10.8.
Thanks for your opinion
 

chscag

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Welcome to our forums.

A 2009 iMac is vintage as far as Apple is concerned and it is after all going on 9 years old. I'm guessing that your problem with slow booting and sometimes not booting is probably due to failing hardware. (most likely the hard drive) You might want to consider getting a newer iMac.
 
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Some options to try;

After a good startup, restart your iMac? This may help “confirm” proper settings.
After a good startup, check to confirm your hard drive is selected as the current startup drive. Look in System Preferences > Startup Drive, then select the drive and select “restart”.
Try NVRAM reset, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063.
Try an SMC reset, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295.
Also, try to boot into Safe mode, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262.
One last suggestion would be to boot into Recovery, and run Disk Utility > Repair Disk, to check your hard drive for errors, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314.
 
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Good afternoon,
I have booted and run Disk Utility : it seems to have clered the issue. the two last boots were very quick and as expected.
The disk is a SSD which is recent.
Best regards

Billy
 
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Good morning

Well, I am rather disappointed. This morning, again the slow boot behaviour. Took ages. Had to kill it and then it booted again in seconds.
So one more syptom: the slow boot feature appears the day after ! it looks as if switching to another day would disturb something and then slow booting appears.

Any ideas, keeping in fact that having a brand new Imac would probably appeal to Apple but is definitely not in my plans ?

Thanks a lot !
 

chscag

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You stated above that you ran Disk Utility and that seemed to clear the issue. Did Disk Utility indicate that it had found errors and corrected them? As I said in my first reply to you, it appears the problem is hardware related. SSDs fail the same as spinning hard drives do. To eliminate software as the problem, you might want to do a clean install of macOS to see if that helps.
 
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The next time, you get a good boot, don’t shut down, let your Mac sleep. It will run maintenance scripts when it is not being used.
 
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My late 2009 27" iMac runs better than new with an SSD. ....cheaper than a new iMac.
 

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