Hard Drive Issue after NVRAM

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hoku2020 Author

Level 1

4 points

Hard Drive Issue after NVRAM

Good Morning All;

I am running a Mac Pro 5,1 with OS 10.11.8

(2) Hard Drives one system and the other backup.

My Mac has been running very slow. Yesterday I used ‘Clean My PC, which ran as expected. Nothing helped with making the Mac run faster. After Boot, it could take 3 or more minutes before I could get to a useable state, YET all was running normal. Reading on the Apple forums, Apple Support suggested that a NVRAM reset might help. I did the NVRAM reset, and I am now running much faster. But NVRAM reset created a serious problem.

But now I have a serious problem after doing the NVRAM reset. My system hard drive is running fine. But my BackUp hard drive no longer shows in Finder. If I go to Finder Preferences and click to display my hard drives on my desktop, then the BackUp drive shows. My Backup hard drive also shows in Disk Utility. I did First Aid on the Backup Hard Drive, but do problems were found.

I use Super Duper for Backup. Super Duper does show my Backup Hard Drive, but its in night gray, not selectable. I did go to my Desktop and opened the Backup Hard Drive and its all there, appears nothing wrong.

What do I have to do to get my Backup Hard Drive recognized so I is available in finder and super duper. I ask this question as I am not very literate in the inner workings of computers.

Thanks For your help

Paul

Posted on Oct 12, 2020 7:06 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

127,891 points

Oct 12, 2020 9:08 AM in response to hoku2020

The identity of the start-up drive is stored in PRAM/NVRAM, so that your Mac knows where to boot from. Loss of that information (by resetting NVRAM to defaults) can sometimes cause an initial delay in starting up (until you set startup drive again).

It generally does not cause ongoing delays in the running system.

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Answer 2

Oct 12, 2020 7:51 AM in response to hoku2020

There are no pervasive reports that PRAM/NVRAM reset CAUSES slowness, so this may be a correlation, not a cause-and-effect.

I suggest you run this little "Discovery" utility. It fixes NOTHING. Its only reason for being is to create reports (pre-sanitized to NOT include any personally-identifiable information) to be posted back on the forums. This may show the causes for any performance issues.

Using EtreCheck to Troubleshoot Potential… - Apple Community

.

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Answer 3

Oct 12, 2020 7:35 AM in response to hoku2020

If your rotating magnetic drives are over three years old, they could be approaching failure.

NB> Disk Utility only checks the Directory for consistency. It does NOT read any user data blocks.

Bad Blocks can show itself as extreme slowness (or failure to mount if it gets bad enough) because worst case for re-reading one block to get good data (where it comes clean on the 999th out of 1,000 re-tries) take and additional quarter minute of wall-clock time.

A Huge study of consumer-quality drives in google's server farms showed that the most common failure mechanism is the drive accumulates a few errors over time, no big deal. When those blocks are re-written, the drive will use some spare blocks and return to running at full speed.

Then it develops a very large group of Bad Blocks, which causes it to be so unreliable it must be replaced. Their study showed that over a HUGE sample, this occurs within 6 months of the first few errors. (Individual drive samples may attain this state far earlier or far later than the average).

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Answer 4

hoku2020 Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 12, 2020 8:01 AM in response to hoku2020

I did not say that the NVRAM caused this problem.

Apple Support on these forums recommended doing a NVRAM reset for a very slow Mac. Which I did.

I did state that after the NVRAM reset, this issue surfaced. Thats documented history

Lets get to the issue. What would cause a hard drive to show in Disk Utility, About MY Computer, on my Desktop, but NOT show in finder. Its obvious the HD is there, what is needed to make it show in finder so I can use Super Duper as always (for years) to do my backups.

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Answer 5

Oct 12, 2020 8:45 AM in response to hoku2020

When a drive refuses to Mount, this is sometimes caused by Directory corruption. Disk Utility First Aid/Repair function is intended to address such a problem.

Failure to mount a drive is a problem, but does not usually correlate to system slowness.

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Answer 6

hoku2020 Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 12, 2020 8:55 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

The problem is solved. The neighbor kid is really good on computers, he runs Mac. He told me to go to About this Computer and be sure the start up drive is not set to the Backup drive. If it is set to the back up drive go to preferences>start up and select the System drive and all will be well.

I did exactly has he directed, he was right. I changed to the System drive as start up. All is now back to normal. I have no idea how, but resetting the NVRAM changed by start up drive to the backup drive.

Problem is over, thanks for your suggestions

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Answer 7

hoku2020 Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 12, 2020 7:41 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

My drives are less that 1 year old. They Are Western Digital 1TB Black drives. My drives are fine, the problem started right after doing a NVRAM reset.

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Answer 8

hoku2020 Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 12, 2020 11:23 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

-Thank You, Now I understand what happened. It will not escape me if at any time in the future NVRAM is reset

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Hard Drive Issue after NVRAM

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