Slow Boot Up on Mojave - External USB SSD -possible answer / solution

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AntonQ1956 Author

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9 points

Slow Boot Up on Mojave - External USB SSD -possible answer / solution

I've been researching this issue and haven't found anything that clearly identifies why the Mojave update sometimes slows to several minutes to boot from an SSD drive both internally and thru external USB3 connection.

My issue was attempting to clone to a bigger drive for the first time.

Note I already had successfully updated in place from Mojave and it was working perfectly on an older smaller SSD 240 GB drive.

Macbook Pro laptop mid-2012

8Gb ram

Samsung Evo 500GB ssd new drive

AData 240GB SSD old drive running Mojave 10.14.1

I had not properly researched Mojave cloning process, but I discovered its not possible to simply clone the drive using Disk utility, like I had done dozens of times before in Sierra under HFS+ file structure. Did you know that if your new drive is already reformatted as an empty APFS drive, the Mojave install does not complete successfully?
It only runs when the receiving drive is in the HFS+ Apple Journaled format.
HOWEVER there is one exception to that..if you already are running Mojave APFS OS, it will simply refresh the OS and preserves your data and accounts when reinstalling!
This is important for later in my story...

So I decided to do a clean Mojave install to the newer bigger SSD drive, carefully following preconditions, formatting drive in Apple Journaled format and everything went smoothly until i rebooted from the newly minted Mojave Drive version 10.14.4
First time, I installed Mojave to the USB 3 attached samsung SSD drive and I copied over all the old data and accounts during the upgrade from the old drive.

Startup took several minutes, which was unacceptable.

So I redid the upgrade, wiped the Samsung Evo and reformatted to HFS+ again. This time I reran the Mojave installer and left the drive empty and only an admin account created. The reboot was still the same ridiculous slow boot and after Mohave finally started the performance was still abysmal and painfully slow.
The crazy thing was the old SSD hard drive continued to start just fine when I go back to it. Just not the new SSD newly created.

Thats when I finally started researching online to see if others had the same slow boot issue after creating a new / upgraded Mojave SSD drive. Looks like it's an outstanding hit/miss issue not everyone has.

What I noted is that everyone assumes a clean reformat and install is the better option.

However, I discovered I could reinstall Mojave on the old Mojave drive, with no consequences.. and it still booted quickly and without issues.

That's when I thought, how about just installing the Mojave over the newly created Mojave drive without reformatting it? It seemed to solve the booting issue that originally shows up for me.

My setup is the following -

Internal drive with original system.. I copied the Mojave OS install here to the Desktop to create the installer on the attached external spare SSD I had. Or follow steps to create a USB bootable installer.
Attached USB3 SSD used as the installer drive. (or bootable USB stick?)
Second attached USB3 SSD with fully configured Mojave drive OS running very slowly

I created the Installer on a spare external SSD. I'm sure you could do the same with a Bootable USB version of the Mojave installer.
After creating installed, reboot and hold the OPTION key during reboot to show all available startup drives. NOTE that the OS INSTALLER shows up as one of the drives and should be the one you pick to boot from.
Mojave installation procedure starts and you should show ALL DRIVES to pick the other external drive already installed with Mojave.
Reinstall Mojave which takes another 15-20 minutes or so depending on the speed of your external drive and connections.
I only learned after doing this, the Installer drive somehow removes the booting format and no longer shows up in subsequent OPTION reboots. Needs to be setup from the Mojave Install app again if you are using a spare drive like I did...(or know how to make it bootable again)
After starting again and allowing the OS to complete, the reboot of the twice written Mojave drive now runs flawlessly and quickly using either the OPTION boot or selecting it as the startup disk in the System preferences.

I'm not sure if this will work for anyone else but I've tried this now a couple of times on two different laptops of the same vintage (Mid 2012 MBP) and so far continues to work each time..

Hope this helps someone else in their quest for SSD performance in Mojave.

Posted on Apr 3, 2019 11:27 AM

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Answer 1

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AntonQ1956 Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 3, 2019 1:48 PM in response to rccharles

Too cheap to clone.. looking for procedures that work with existing tools..

Didn't make sense to me why Mojave was so problematic when upgrading for some and not others.

Installer even provides a built in Migration option to copy as much as you want of the old drive over to your new drive.

So a simple reinstall over the existing Mojave OS makes a lot of sense and simple to do..

Just need a separate installer device to boot from and then redirect to overwrite the existing Mojave drive already running and installed.

I haven't found anyone offering this particular solution before, so I'm hoping there's some feedback to indicate if it's a fix that works for any others with slow Mojave issues or not.

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Answer 2

AntonQ1956 Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 3, 2019 2:42 PM in response to rccharles

OK.. just wanted to keep it simple for those of us not so technically inclined..

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Answer 3

DonH49

Level 6

16,716 points

Apr 3, 2019 12:47 PM in response to AntonQ1956

you said: "Did you know that if your new drive is already reformatted as an empty APFS drive, the Mojave install does not complete successfully?"

would like to read that information from which you found.

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Answer 4

AntonQ1956 Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 3, 2019 12:54 PM in response to DonH49

Didn't find that anywhere, that was my experience trying to install on a preformatted SSD drive in APFS before I read the Mojave install instructions. There were errors when installing and it never completed successfully.

I thought it needed to be preformatted..

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Answer 5

rccharles

Level 6

13,037 points

Apr 3, 2019 1:43 PM in response to AntonQ1956

How did you go about cloning the drive?

I'd suspect something wrong with the new drive. I'd do some time of timing on the new drive vs. the old drive.

Test Read & Write Speed of an External Drive or USB Flash Key

osxdaily.com/2013/08/31/test-read-write-speed-external-drive/

( I have not used this app. )

For cloning, I'd use:

Carbon Copy Cloner will copy your startup drive to an

external firewire drive. You can boot from the external

drive to verify that you have a good clone. When you upgrade your

existing startup drive, you can at any time boot from your external

drive and go back to your existing system.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes

recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup

painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is

understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler

makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully

on both Intel and Power PC Macs!

Give SuperDuper a workout on your own system. Clone to your heart's

content — for free. See what else is possible. When you're convinced

that SuperDuper is a terrific solution — and a great value at $27.95

— you can register right from the application and start using its

advanced features immediately!

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

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Answer 6

rccharles

Level 6

13,037 points

Apr 3, 2019 5:07 PM in response to AntonQ1956

Then you pay the $s to keep it simple. They are selling simplicity. I believe CCC uses the Unix rsync command to make the copies. Good luck with figuring out that command.

R

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Answer 7

rccharles

Level 6

13,037 points

Apr 18, 2019 4:58 PM in response to AntonQ1956

Way to go!

R

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Answer 8

rccharles

Level 6

13,037 points

Apr 3, 2019 2:17 PM in response to AntonQ1956

I'd do some type of timing on the new drive vs. the old drive. You need to sort out if there is a problem with the drive. I believe that SuperDuper is free for cloning.

I've install mojave on the internal drive. Ran ok. Didn't see anything I needed. I'm now running yosemite on an external ssd. I'm given up upgrading my os. I have lots of backups in case I get hacked.

supposedly, you can use disk utility to back up and clone.

I used dd to clone disks. Target needs to be same size or larger than source. If larger use disk utility to enlarge resulting partition.

dd if=/dev/zero of=zero bs=1024k count=101

dd if=/dev/disk0s10 bs=4096m | gzip | dd of=~/disk0-s10 bs=4096m

dd if=~/disk0-s10 bs=4096m | gunzip | dd of=/dev/disk0s10 bs=4096m

sudo kill -s siginfo $(pgrep ^dd) # get dd info

you would do something like:

dd if=/dev/disk0s10 bs=4096m | dd of=/dev/disk1s10 bs=4096m

You better be careful and you better know what you are doing. You'll need to be booted from a third drive.

dd is a block by block copy.

R

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Answer 9

AntonQ1956 Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 18, 2019 3:38 PM in response to AntonQ1956

Update on solution...

So what I've discovered is that it for me, it has boiled down to a questionable ribbon cable in the laptop running the old drive.

New drive works great from an external USB connection, but when I reinstalled it internally, it slowed to a crawl, which didn't make any sense to me. Final last straw was to replace the SATA ribbon cable even though there was nothing wrong with it, no moving parts etc, etc.. I know. But it was a 10 year old machine and I've seen that cable cause other issues before.

The other thing was first time I did this, it slowed down exactly the same way and I suspected other issues during the drive OS creation. So with it doing the same thing a second time after all the gyrations I went thru and making no difference, that left only the internal SATA cable to replace.

And voila! It fixed my issue.. New and old drive now run perfectly from the internally mounted drive.

I suspect it had to do with the fact the Samsung EVO SSD was just that much quicker than the older SSD it replaced internally causing communication issues thru the older cable.

Anyways, worked for me.

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Slow Boot Up on Mojave - External USB SSD -possible answer / solution

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