Incredibly long boot times with 10.4.8/Mac Pro

[GoldenRedux]

I'm not really sure if this should be here or in the hardware area, so apologies if it's out of place. The mods may move it as they see fit.

I upgraded to OS X 10.4.8 last night, and I'm not sure if it has anything to do with it, but now when I turn on my Mac Pro 2.66GhZ, it takes anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes for the firmware to intialise and bring up the Apple logo. All that time, I just get a blank white screen.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

 

[UnaClocker]

My MiniMac did that last night.. G4 1.5GHz version.. Powered it up and it just sat there for almost a minute before finally popping up the boot logo.. Hopefully it was just a one time thing, I haven't rebooted since..

 

[GoldenRedux]

My MiniMac did that last night.. G4 1.5GHz version.. Powered it up and it just sat there for almost a minute before finally popping up the boot logo.. Hopefully it was just a one time thing, I haven't rebooted since..

It's happened a few time with me already now. The weird thing is, once or twice it started immediately.

 

[GoldenRedux]

Well, now I am starting to get the question mark '?' icon on startup, like it can't find my OS X HD or the drive is corrupted or dead. I've checked OS X volume, verified the permissions, and so on and there are no problems, so I don't understand what could be going wrong. It must be that 10.4.8 update screwing something up.

 

[rman]

When you say checked, did you go to system preferences -> startup disk and reselect the boot folder?

 

[GoldenRedux]

When you say checked, did you go to system preferences -> startup disk and reselect the boot folder?

I ran disk utility, verified the disk, verified disk permissions, checked the startup folder in the system preferences and re-selcted the OS X volume. Under the system profiler, all hardware including the hard disks and all RAM and peripherals are appearing as normal. I have no idea what the issue could be, other than the 10.4.8 update, which is when this all started happening.

I did have an idea this morning. I moved OS X onto a larger, 750GB hard drive that resides in the third drive bay. It was working fine for about a week or two before the 10.4.8 update. I wonder if 10.4.8 is expecting to see OS X in the first drive bay and that's what's causing the boot problems? When I get the opportunity, I will swap the drives around and see of that helps any.