Imac help please.

soupdragon

soupdragon

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I have a 2016 27" imac, i5 I think with 32gb ram.
Since about 6-8 weeks back the boot up has been real slow.
Originally, from power button press to password took about 25 seconds (best guess). Now it is taking about 1 to 1.5 minutes.

Anyone having similar issues?
The actual operating speed seems unaffected.
 
Good first step is to reset NVRAM and PRAM (see here)

It's the go-to first step of troubleshooting any mac issues.

Next option, if you have an external drive available, is to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable copy of your main drive and try booting off that externally (which may or may not be faster depending on the drive type - USB2/3/Firewire etc). Two advantages to this - 1. you get a copy! and 2, if it's faster, your internal drive may be on the way out.

For example, if you get read errors while doing this, the drive is dying.

Third step, once you've verified your backup copy is good (and perhaps made a second to be safe), is to copy back the backup over the main drive (again using CCC); this will remove any fragmentation (if that's an issue - shouldn't be), but will also generally ensure the drive is working well. Alternatively, invest in a external SSD, connect it to the USB 3 / Firewire ports and boot off that - it will be plenty fast enough.

Main message though is START BACKING STUFF UP!
 
Thanks.
I disconnected the two back up drives as I thought that nay have been the problem. No change.
I did the PRAM thing on Sunday with no luck.

I didn't know about the NVRAM so that'll be my next step.

If all else fails I'll put it back to the previous OS and live without the new features of whatever the OS is now (Mojave I think).
 
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As you add more stuff to your system booting will take longer. The easy but expensive way to fix this is to replace your boot drive with a SSD (assuming you aren't already booting off a SSD of course). The harder but cheaper way (depending on how you value your time) is to work out exactly what the boot process is doing and see what can be taken out. I would recommend option 1.
 
Thanks.

It never slowed down all the time I was running sierra even with a rammed hard drive.

My mac book pro on the other hand, is very quick to start.

Is there a way of listing processes that load at boot?
 
I had this for a while as my hard drive slowly died. Worth backing up now to ensure you don't lose anything and maybe think about a SSD install. Although I'm sure this is more difficult on later iMacs. On my mac mini it was a 20 minute job to physically install the drive.
 
T_J_G said:
I had this for a while as my hard drive slowly died. Worth backing up now to ensure you don't lose anything and maybe think about a SSD install. Although I'm sure this is more difficult on later iMacs. On my mac mini it was a 20 minute job to physically install the drive.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately the 27" 2016 onward imac is held together with double sided tape and require a new gasket and alignment tool when they are re-built.
I have 2 X 4tb back up drives so I'll most likely do a clean install and leave the OS at High Sierra as that seemed quickest.
 
You haven't mentioned if you are using an old style hard drive, or an SSD drive (or Fusion?). If it is an old style hard drive, it seems fairly standard, but I would be concerned if an SSD based system was doing that.

How much free space do you have on the boot volume, you really need at least 10% free, below that things really slow down.
 
It's the original drive which I think is analogue.
 
For anyone suffering the same agonizingly slow start up speeds, the only way I could get it back to normal was to scrub the disk and do a clean install.
I did not go back to osx sierra and installed Mojave off the bat.

It goes without saying I backed up all my stuff before doing this.
 
The option I went down when mine started to slow down was to buy a small external SSD and boot from that. Essentially using the internal HDD for storage and the external SSD for applications.
 
Sniffer said:
The option I went down when mine started to slow down was to buy a small external SSD and boot from that. Essentially using the internal HDD for storage and the external SSD for applications.
Click to expand...
That's actually not a bad idea.
 
Although you have fixed your machine by reinstalling there are a couple of other things you could have tried.

Find the Combo updater for your install of OSX and download and apply that. (Search in google for “combo 10.x.x” and find it on the Apple website, they are quite large files)

Startup in Single user mode and do a FSCK and mount ( at the end of all the tiny white text, when you start in single user mode, are the instructions for FSCK and mount. )

Pretty much the same as above is starting in recovery mode and running first aid in Disk Utility.

As others have said, spinning disks are slow with modern OSX versions. It’s like they have been abandoned by Apple. I sometimes wonder if Tim Cook and Jonny Ive are not allowed access to older machines, in the same way The Queen thinks the world smells of paint.
 
Well I'm not very computer literate so, as I was familiar with re-installing the OS, it seemed my best option.
Thanks for the info though.
 
soupdragon said:
For anyone suffering the same agonizingly slow start up speeds, the only way I could get it back to normal was to scrub the disk and do a clean install.
I did not go back to osx sierra and installed Mojave off the bat.
Click to expand...

Interesting. I thought Apple had resolved the issue of installs getting slower over time with Lion & later, but apparently not. 10.5 Leopard required reinstalling about every 18 months to keep the speed up on HDD.
 
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