More than 3 minutes to boot Panther?!

jbraddy

Registered
I am working on a dual-boot Mac G4 MDD (1.25 GHz single processor) running Mac OS 9.22 and Mac OS 10.3.2. Even after repeated OS installations and system tweaking (fixing permissions, checking fonts, etc.), the Mac takes from 3 to 4 minutes to boot in OS X. When it does boot, normal operation of the Mac seems sluggish.

What would cause this?

I'm running the same operating system on a much older G4, and the older G4 boots quickly and runs just fine in OS 10.3.2.

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
Hmm, were you bound to a directory server at any point? If you were bound to one open directory access and check your ldap settings, if there are any not local authentication paths, etc. turn them off.
 
Is there any particular reason you are not updating your panther version?
How much ram does your system have and is there any network your mac is connected to? Did you check the CPU activity? And how does your system run on OS9?
 
This Mac is at OS 10.3.2 now due to a new installation of Panther. It was at 10.3.9 once, but I couldn't take the sluggishness any more and decided a new installation was in order. The Mac runs like a champ in OS 9.2.2. I have 512 megabytes of RAM installed.
 
This Mac isn't used for e-mail. That's done on another office machine. No directory access points have ever been established for the G4.
 
could you perhaps update, or does the "sluggishness" problem lie in 10.3.9 itself? If you can update that would be a good starting point, but as I said before I have experienced similar problems that were linked to ldap. Also did you do an archive and install or a fresh install? You may want to check your start-up items to see if anything odd is in there. A couples of other things to try would be disconnecting all peripherals such as printers, external hard drives, etc and trying to boot. Also you could try holding the shift key at startup which will disable all thirdparty startup items...see if that helps, if it does you can then try to narrow it down to the problem item.
 
i found that panther was never that fast at booting. it was one of the big improvements to 10.4 that boot times were greatly reduced.
 
Lt Major Burns said:
i found that panther was never that fast at booting. it was one of the big improvements to 10.4 that boot times were greatly reduced.
I have to second that... 10.3 is slower@ the booting time.. also try resetting your vram and look into your startup item, located in your accounts pref.delete all and see waht that does for your startup time..
 
Well is hitting shift at boot is the trick than it can be narrowed down to startup items. also if you have multiple hard drives or optical drives or if your HDD and optical drive are on the same controller, check the jumpers because if they are both set to master or both set to slave or one CS and one master or slave than you could be confusing the computer, that has also happened to me before.
 
Running Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on the same system is really not the best idea. Is there some reason that you are booting into Mac OS 9? Could the same task be done in Classic?

The file systems used by both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X may both be called HFS+, but they are actually different. Running in Mac OS 9 can break prebindings and mess up journaling. All of which can significantly effect the speed of Mac OS X.

On the other hand, Classic goes out of it's way to try to keep everything within the users home folder so not to disturb the rest of the volume's contents.

If you need a Mac OS 9 system... make it a Mac OS 9-only system. The two operating systems treat the same computer far to different to live happily together. Specially with changes Apple has been adding with every major update to Mac OS X (things were different with 10.0/10.1 or even 10.2 to some degree).
 
When you first build OS X, doesn't it consume a lot of CPU/Disk i/o trying to build it's Sheerlock index?

Also, it will take longer to boot the first time any after any hard re-boots (kernel panics, power outages, etc.)

OS X might need to do some catchup work when you switch from OS 9 to OS X.
 
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