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El Capitan 10.11.6 SLOW boot problems w/1TB SSD & iMac i7
Recently, not sure exactly when, before or after upgrade to 10.11.5, boot times have gone from almost instant to many minutes. To trace, I have removed external hard drives from boot up, have started with SHIFT UP arrow to remove all possible extensions from loading at boot up, I upgraded my nVidia drivers, reset PRAM, etc. Nothing has helped. A variety of disk repair tools, including Disk Utility do not show a problem with the drive, which is a 1.12 Apple fusion drive (OEM apple). The drive shows 298.11 GB free of 1.11 TB. So it does not appear to be the drive filling up. Or does it? As an SSD drive, is this too full?
The machine boots up fine to about the 50% point, then something it’s loading causes it to stall for a long time. It does get through the process eventually.
This is a machine from late 2012. I do suspect the drive given it’s age. I wouldn’t just reformat it, but would replace it and use it in an external case for simple backups.
Has anyone else encountered this and have a fix? As mentioned, it was booting just fine until a few weeks ago, about the time of the upgrade to El Capitan.
If I buy a new 1TB drive, I assume I can Time machine the old drive to the new one, remove the old one, and install the new one. I would only do that after booting from the new drive using a TB connected drive dock. Is the internal SSD on these replaceable?
Machine Specs….
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac13,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 3.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 32 GB
Boot ROM Version: IM131.010A.B0AThoughts?
Thanks in advance.
Al
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2 Replies
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[Al Bergstein] “The machine boots up fine to about the 50% point, then something it’s loading causes it to stall for a long time. It does get through the process eventually. “
What I have noticed is that the 50% point is where the graphics drivers get loaded. My 2010 Mac Pro has 2 monitors connected to my Radeon HD 7950 via DisplayPort cables and it boots on the first one, then at about the 50% point it pauses and the second monitor lights up, and then it keeps going. Based on this behavior, I would suspect your graphics card drivers. Maybe they need updating for El Capitan? (just a guess but it’s the best one I got) 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Thanks John. That’s also what I thought. But I have the nVidia driver program that automatically checks for the proper driver and it told me that I was not on the proper driver for the OS I was using. I do agree that traditionally graphics drivers load at the 50% mark, and I suspected it. But have been thrown off by the fact that the nVidia program said I was up to date. I’ll try reinstalling the graphics drivers tomorrow. My MacBook Pro is not experiencing this problem but it is running Yosemite 10.10.5. I certainly will not be upgrading it to El Cap. until I flesh this all out.
It’s wierd that this graphics problem is fairly common (it’s not the first time over the years I’ve dealt with this). You’d think these folks would have worked it out by now!
Al
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