Thread: Speeding up boot times - EFI

no but if you hold down command + v (i think) at boot time it will boot in verbose mode so you can see what is taking so long

That depends on where in the boot cycle it is hanging as I believe that verbose mode only applies once booting has been handed off to the OS (though I could be wrong as I rarely use verbose mode).

When you say you have a white screen, do you mean the light grey with the Apple logo or something else? If it is prior to the Apple logo, then there is likely some bad hardware causing the issue. If that is the case, i'd suggest bringing it in the house and running some diagnostics on it to see if you can find the culprit (could be your drive, it's controller, the mother board, bad RAM, or something else seemingly unrelated that the EFI tests at boot).

Apple support will probably be your best bet if you still have AppleCare on it.

-dave

verbose mode does away with any of the mentioned screens. it is black background with white text the whole way. I'd seriously check it to see what it says

also. since you didn't mention it this is an intel I am assuming since G4s don't have EFI. you seem to know what you are talking about so I'm guessing its not a G4

I'd actually wager it has something to do with a network interface. In my experience with slow boot times anyway

Originally Posted by Machinehead

I wouldn't think it's bad hardware since everything works,

Bad is a relative term. It could be a piece of hardware that you don't regularly use (but is tested at boot) or it could be something responding slower based on the usage pattern that the boot operation utilizes (e.g. maybe the blocks where the XNU kernel are located are going bad and throwing read errors while (most of) the rest of your drive is just fine).

Another item that is possible is fsck. If it believes that your disk structure is "dirty" (typically after power loss or a hard crash), the OS will run fsck on the disks before proceeding with booting and is somewhat normal and can take some time. If it is doing a fsck, that should show up in verbose mode. If it is doing a fsck every time, even if you shutdown/reboot cleanly, then that can also be indicative of a drive going bad.

I've never timed it (cause it hasn't been slow enough to care), but at a guess i'd say my CoreSolo boots in around 15 seconds give or take a few. I don't think 30 is unreasonable, but if this is a new phenomenon for you then it is indicative of something changing.

-dave

ha ha I was just coming back to post about the fsck. you beat me. I'm almost positive tho that if there is a problem it will show up in a verbose boot

you haven't said how you are certain that this problem is EFI related... I'm curious as to how you are able to come to that conclusion. sounds like if your system isn't being shutdown properly it is a combination of fsck and out of date boot caches