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boot optimizing the file system mount MYSTERY
Authored by: SOX on Apr 07, '03 11:31:06PM

On my computer I have TWO mysterIES that ARE driving me nuts. at boot time there is a very very long (maybe a minute?) wait while the computer mounts the filesystem. Its not doing an fsck or anything its just mounting the file system AFTER A CLEAN restart or shutdown. One can hear a furious amoun of disk activity. (I know this is the file system mount from booting with the command-V option).

Finally after this ends, the computer continues quickly through the rest of the lauch, quickly starting journalling, and a slight pause if the airport is on to set the network. then there is a brief delay while it creates my login and desktop.

Finally it mysteriously hits the disk again just as it finishes the startup items (stickies and terminal app). on and on, ans slow as a snail (hard to change windows, or get a response from the terminal). then it stops and all is well.

if I run TOP during this minute or so of disk grinding I dont see any application gobbling cpu time. the load is about 60% idle.

I think something is hitting the disk (and causing all this "idle" cpu load). but I cant spot the culprit.

is there any tool that can tell me who is grinding on the Disk??

and why does the file system seem to take so long to mount?

it did not do this when it was new. I currently have about 65% of my 60Gig disk used. At times I have had more of it used, so it occurs to me there could be some fragmentation of the disk I guess. Not sure how bsdUnix copes with that, and I'm too scared to use norton utils since there lots of horror stories.



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Re: boot optimizing the file system mount MYSTERY
Authored by: hayne on Apr 08, '03 12:54:22AM

Two comments:
1) Have you done 'fsck' yourself to make sure there isn't something wrong with the filesystem?
2) You can use 'sudo fs_usage' to get (voluminous) info on what processes are reading & writing to disk.



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boot optimizing the file system mount MYSTERY
Authored by: Anonymous on Apr 08, '03 03:40:11PM

Hi,
I had similar problems but after

update_prebinding -root / -force

and a restart everything was fine again!

Rene



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boot optimizing the file system mount MYSTERY
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Sep 04, '05 03:37:06PM

With very slow disk reads, it's also worth checking for bad blocks on the hard drive--I see a fair number of those on my client's hard drives. If a drive has bad blocks, sometimes they can be "fixed" by formatting the drive with Disk Utility's option to zero all data, but at least half the time, the bad blocks return, so it's better to just replace the drive.



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