iMac High Sierra slow progress bar during boot in 2013 iMac

I've got a Late 2013 27" iMac, pretty much maxed out - 32 GB ram, 1TB SSD, and the fastest processor available at the time, a quad core i7.


It worked well for quite a while. But sometime last year, it developed a couple of problems.


I had it originally (I think) on El Capitan, then upgraded to High Sierra about 18 months ago. About 6 months ago, it developed the problem. About three months ago, it got another symptom.


Problem 1 is that during boot, it takes a looooonng time to get past the white apple progress bar. I mean, like 20 minutes sitting at 80 percent. This happens at every boot. It also happens if I try to boot into safe mode.


Second symptom is that, when screen sharing with this mac, the screen sharing performance is terrible. Mouse clicks and keyboard activity are very delayed. If I select some files and try to drag them, sometimes it misses the select and ends up registering the click somewhere else.


I've tried the screen sharing with another client, Chicken for the Mac, even worse performance. I frequently screen share with 5 or so other Macs both local and over a VPN, with very good performance, just not the iMac anymore.


I've tried:


  • Resetting the SMC
  • Resetting NVRAM
  • Rebooting into Safe Mode and then normally booting
  • Re-installing High Sierra through the recovery console (i.e. not wiping the disk, just an OS reinstall).
  • I've also turned off any startup items that looked dicey or old.
  • I've unplugged all peripherals
  • There is plenty of free space on the boot drive
  • I've run first aid on the startup disk and there are no issues
  • Verified that TRIM is still enabled on the startup SSD


I'd like to update to Mojave, but want to fix this issue first if I can.


Anyone have any ideas or experience?


Thanks

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Feb 26, 2019 7:12 PM

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Posted on Apr 2, 2019 12:06 PM

Ok, I figured out the reason screen sharing was slow. I feel a little stupid. Because of some VPN issues, I opened up the screen sharing port (5900) through my router so I could still get into my network when away and try to fix the VPN. When I looked in the console I saw a constant stream of these:


default 11:46:30.867004 -0700 screensharingd Authentication: FAILED :: User Name: N/A :: Viewer Address: 185.156.177.44 :: Type: VNC DES


Sooooo ... looks like I was constantly being bombarded with brute force attempts on screen sharing, which was making it crazy slow, and probalby explained why it again seemed normal after a reboot - it took a while for the attacks to resume.


That still leaves me with the slow boot issue. I am going to back everything up, wipe the disk, and install Mojave and all apps from scratch.

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Apr 2, 2019 12:06 PM in response to BDAqua

Ok, I figured out the reason screen sharing was slow. I feel a little stupid. Because of some VPN issues, I opened up the screen sharing port (5900) through my router so I could still get into my network when away and try to fix the VPN. When I looked in the console I saw a constant stream of these:


default 11:46:30.867004 -0700 screensharingd Authentication: FAILED :: User Name: N/A :: Viewer Address: 185.156.177.44 :: Type: VNC DES


Sooooo ... looks like I was constantly being bombarded with brute force attempts on screen sharing, which was making it crazy slow, and probalby explained why it again seemed normal after a reboot - it took a while for the attacks to resume.


That still leaves me with the slow boot issue. I am going to back everything up, wipe the disk, and install Mojave and all apps from scratch.

Feb 26, 2019 7:27 PM in response to NOYBUS

It definitely has all the symptoms of a hardware problem, and upgrading macOS isn't going to fix that.


You already performed all the usual remedies. Open  (Apple menu) > About This Mac, and click System Report...


The System Information app will open. the leftmost column, select Storage. Under Volume Name you will find one or more entries, one of which is your Mac's startup disk. It is usually the one named "Macintosh HD" unless you renamed it.


Under that heading you will find a description of that startup volume, beginning with Available and ending with S.M.A.R.T. Status. Select all that information, encompassing everything, then Copy and Paste that information in a reply to this Discussion.

Feb 26, 2019 8:46 PM in response to NOYBUS

The only suggestions I have are that there appear to be a number of non-Apple "utility" and / or "drive management" things installed that can only cause trouble. They include but are not necessarily limited to:


  • "ExpanDrive"
  • Western Digital "drive manager" or similarly categorized non-Apple disk "utility"
  • Anything produced by "EaseUS"... but for no other reason that I have had nothing but bad experiences with their products.


That may not be an all-inclusive list, and there are other suspects, but those modifications to your Mac warrant investigation. For example,


com.cpsww.ppupsd.plist (? d1c774db - installed 2016-12-08)


... is another one with which I'm not familiar. I have no idea what it is, but it's affecting that Mac to an unknown degree.


As a rule I don't install things that offer to "help" Macs in that manner. They can only degrade its performance or accelerate eventual hardware failure.

Feb 27, 2019 6:29 AM in response to NOYBUS

Those files are probably ok, but I am not an EtreCheck expert. Perhaps BDAqua might notice something I overlooked.


Does the Mac boot any faster now? Boot "verbose mode" and check.


If you continue to have trouble it's quite possible a hardware problem exists, and only Apple can make a definitive diagnosis. At your option consider using Apple Hardware Test / Apple Diagnostics but the only two possible outcomes are to definitively identify a fault that only Apple can fix, or fail to identify a fault that nevertheless exists. Either way, it still requires a trip to the Genius Bar.


How to use Apple Hardware Test on your Mac - Apple Support

How to use Apple Diagnostics on your Mac - Apple Support

Feb 26, 2019 8:31 PM in response to NOYBUS

With CMD-V verbose mode, this is the last thing I saw before it went into the progress bar, and stopped posting verbose text (see attached screen shot).


The boot does seems faster right now for some reason. About three minutes or so in the progress bar. It was as high as 20 minutes earlier today. I wonder if some of what I did helped things a bit.


Feb 26, 2019 9:05 PM in response to John Galt

I removed the Western Digital one and the orphaned reference to EaseUS. ExpanDrive is a tool that allows mounting of SFTP and what not as drives, seems ok, been using it for years and it doesn't affect my Macbook Pro.


What does the file system number represent? What is a reasonable value?


ppupsd is I believe from the Cyberpower UPS Power Panel software. It is probably required for the Mac to talk to the UPS.


Thanks much for your help in this BTW.

Feb 27, 2019 7:54 AM in response to BDAqua

Yes, I called CyberPower support and they verified that there are no reported issues with PowerPanel for Business software up through 10.14 Mojave.


I haven't tried booting again since last night. Last night seemed to improve with around 3 minutes total for the boot process, but still longer than I had hoped. I'll try again this morning after removing those startup / login items.

Feb 26, 2019 7:31 PM in response to NOYBUS

Boot up hold CMD+v keys to get a Verbose Mode boot that may show like a log what/where the holdup is.


Post a report from this please...


EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.


http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

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iMac High Sierra slow progress bar during boot in 2013 iMac

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