OSX 10.3.x VERY Slow bootup

[Burgal]

Recently, we've had 2 out of our 4 OSX 10.3.8 machines taking 10 minutes to boot.

The mac starts up, loads OSX and gets to the finder screen with the beach ball of death. It sits there, mouse is movable, for 10 minutes then continues to load the rest of the OS.

Very frustrating for our users who have to reboot in the middle of the day.

Any ideas?

 

[jmgalvin]

If this happened after the 10.3.8 upgrade, you could consider reverting to an earlier version. My G4 powermac is much slower to boot after that upgrade but nothing like you describe. If everything was fine before, you could live with that.

You can try looking at the various font caches and see if they're chockablock with stuff. You could also see if there's anything in Startup Items that could be causing the problem. Take the stuff out and restart to see what happens. Make sure that Classic does not load at boot also.

Of course you can repair permissions and run Disk Utility from the CD to make sure the drives are ok & don't need repair.

You really shouldn't have to be rebooting unless you install some software that requires it. Your machines should realy not need rebooting at all, or VERY seldom.

 

[Burgal]

I can't directly related it to a specific version be it 10.3.8 or 10.3.7 or whatever. However, I've turned off startup items, and deleted all teh fonts and font caches and still have a slow boot. I thought it could be fonts too, but no-go.

On one of the machines I'm completely reinstalling osx 10.3 and we'll see what happens there.

 

[jmgalvin]

One problem with a reinstall. If you select Archive & Install, you'll retain all the settings, library etc from the old one, but if you install new, you can lose a lot of stuff that will be a PITA to reinstall. You might use Disk Utility to make a copy of the hard drive and then install the old system. Then copy from the clone volume back to the hard drive.

Font caches can be a BIG problem on osx. The bigger they get, the slower the start. I once found 15,000 on my machine. Go to Versiontracker.com and download Font Finagler to clear a lot of those caches. If you use Adobe programs on the machines, use Find to locate "AdobeFnt". Anything with the ".lst" can be trashed. Trashing caches requires a restart of the machine after trashing.

 

[Burgal]

Font caches and font finagler solved the problem.

Thanks