Check startup disk setting if boot times seem slow

May 11, '09 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: fmaxwell

Shortly after getting my MacBook, the power-on boot became drastically slower, with over half of a minute going by before the Apple Logo appeared. I tried many of the suggested fixes, including checking the boot drive for errors, cleaning out caches, looking for duplicate fonts, and fixing permissions. Nothing worked.

I had assumed, because I had only a single hard disk, that it would be, by default, set as the startup Disk in the Startup Disk System Preferences panel. As it turns out, that was not the case. The MacBook's startup disk had somehow been set to Network Startup. So the MacBook would not boot from the hard drive until the network boot attempt timed out. To fix this problem, I selected System Preferences » Startup Disk, and chose my hard disk.

Note: There are multiple causes for slow boot-up and this is just one of them, so this fix, like each of the others, will work in only a minority of cases.

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