Speed up rebooting in Jaguar

G

gatorparrots

~departed~
Some users have noticed a slow booting problem after upgrading an OS X installtion to 10.2. I just ran through the procedure detailed below on my own machine and it noticeably reduced reboot times.

For more detailed background information about the file system check portion of the procedure:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

Here is the list of the steps you should perform:
1). Reset Open Firmware
Reboot and hold down the CMD+OPT+O+F keys. A white open firmware screen will appear. At the prompt type reset-all and then hit return. Your computer should reboot itself. If not, type bye and hit return.

2). Run a file system check
During the next reboot, hold down the CMD+S keys. This will boot you into a text-based single user mode. You can let go of the keys when the black screen and text appears. When the sh-2.05a$ shell prompt appears (after a couple of screens of text), type fsck –y and hit return. This will run a file system check and answer 'yes' to all user prompts automatically. After a series of test passes, it should return results. If it says:
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
then you should re-run fsck –y and hit return. You should run it as many times as necessary until it reports no problems found. (On my system, I only had to run it twice.)

After successfully repairing the file system, at the sh-2.05a$ shell prompt, type reboot and hit return. Your computer will reboot.

If you notice that your computer boots faster, congratulations! You’re almost done.

3). Repair ownership and permissions
One last step: Launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) and click on the 'First Aid' tab. Select your startup disk (internal hard drive) in the list of drives to the far left. Then click on the Repair Disk Permissions button. This will fix any errant permissions or ownership settings on certain critical system files. It should take about 15 minutes to complete.

Quit and reboot for good measure.

That should do it.

The results:
(Timing a typical boot procedure)
00:00 — Power cycling tone, black screen
00:14 — Gray Apple screen appears, then spinning cursor below it
00:25 — Blue loading screen appears, progress of loading items detailed in Mac OS X window
00:33 — Finder desktop appears, login items begin launching
00:48 — All login items loaded (Entourage, Suitcase, Mozilla, Yadal, PTHCPUMonitor, etc.), system is fully useable and ready

(If on a PowerBook, your boot times will doubtless be slower as you are using a 4200 RPM drive, versus desktop 7200 RPM drives, but I would expect them to be around a minute to a minute and a half. Compare this to Windows 2000’s glacial 2.5-3 minute reboots, plus application launches and tray items loading -- this should put OS X's speed potential into perspective.)

Note: Mac OS X (and other UNIX operating systems) don’t like to be shut down hard via an ungraceful restart or power failure. They typically run certain shutdown procedures and scripts when you logout, shutdown, or restart your computer. Over time, small corruption in the file system can accummulate and make booting slow or cause certain types of system instability. Also, running 3rd party installers can cause certain critical system files to have their permissions/ownership changed. The Repair Disk Permissions component of Disk Utility is supplied by Apple to reset these permissions to their default state.
 
Actually there shouldn't be any real need to do the fsck. If you force-restart your computer it automatically does it, that's why Jag takes a really long time to boot sometimes after a hard-restart. Unless you do something under normal use to corrupt your filesystem this is quite unnecessary. Quite simply just do not force-reset your system unless all else fails! Most of the time there's a better way than a force reset when you're running OS X and something screws up.
 
If running fsck more than a few times does not clear up the
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
message how many times should it be run before another path is followed.

And what paths are recommended.

Best regards
Andy
 
Originally posted by G. Peretz

fsck –y and hit return. This will run a file system check and answer 'yes' to all user prompts automatically.
Click to expand...

This is actually quite dangerous, you're telling fsck it's alright to delete files without asking for permission. If it deletes files in critical directories, then your trusty MAC is a paperweight until you replace the missing files. This will be a challenge since you won't have any idea what files it removed. Can you say reload?
 
dafuser--Actually, running fsck -y is a procedure recommended by Apple in this TIL document:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article....alue=100&showSurvey=false&sessionID=anonymous|157488100

Regarding the -y flag, the document states:
The -y flag:

This tells fsck that you want to answer "yes" to all questions about fixing, repairing, or salvaging information. This is the optimal approach, as answering "no" to any question causes fsck to stop. You cannot determine that all necessary repairs have been made until fsck completes and gives its final report.

------

Andy--As far as the number of times to run fsck, I wouldn't think anything more than three times would be profitible. Beyond that, you should first try Disk Utility to test/repair the disk. Failing that, you should look to a well regarded third party utility like Alsoft's Disk Warrior. If you still cannot elinate your file system/disk-related corruption, it may very well be that your hard disk is failing and you will have to backup your data and get a new hard drive.
 
Originally posted by G. Peretz
dafuser--Actually, running fsck -y is a procedure recommended by Apple in this TIL document:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article....alue=100&showSurvey=false&sessionID=anonymous|157488100

Regarding the -y flag, the document states:
The -y flag:

This tells fsck that you want to answer "yes" to all questions about fixing, repairing, or salvaging information. This is the optimal approach, as answering "no" to any question causes fsck to stop. You cannot determine that all necessary repairs have been made until fsck completes and gives its final report.

------
Click to expand...

So running fsck without switches and answering each question doesn't work under OS X? Under other UNIX systems running fsck without switches makes the user anser yes or no to questions like:

salvage
reconnect
remove

You may have answer yes many times when it's trying to reconnect or salvage inodes, but I would never run fsck -y unless all other options failed.

If OS X does fsck different, then I'm glad to know there's a difference when operating under OS X.
 
What is the point of resetting the open firmware? Say, for my computer, I do so - And my knowledge of hardware is sub-par - would it reverse the procedures taken the last time an iMac firmware update was released, or does it just change some its paramters and not do anything as silly as deleting it?

(And yes, this is a rather late post to this thread...)
 
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