macOS Monterey takes 25+ minutes to boot

Decided to do some diagnosis now that I gave Mac time finish it’s boot overnight. Looks like the culprit is the “drivers” that were loaded for the Visiontek VT4900 that I was using. Uninstalled these apps and it seems the MSc is normal. I plan to do another reboot just to make sure.

Did another reboot. Waited for about 15 minutes. Decided to do a hard reset and boot the Mac in safe mode. I had a CrossOver update come through and installed it. It added CrossOver CD Helper as a Login Item. Sophos flagged something in CrossOver as a PUA. (Did not recall this occurring when I first installed CrossOver.). I decided in Safe mode to take out the CrossOver CD Helper app out of the Login Items list. Rebooted, everything seems to be back to normal. I think it is the interaction between Sophos and CrossOver is causing my problems.

Same deal here on a 2017 iMac. Both Big Sur and Monterey suddenly threw the machine into looooonnggg start-up times. Once the 5-minute process is done, everything seems to be running somewhat okay.

Ah, nothing like progress to regress. Watching this thread...

For what it's worth, I'm also trying out a new 2020 iMac. I restored from Time Machine when I bought it. Boot up times are really fast. Of course, the 2020 has an internal SSD drive... but the Fusion drive did not take 10 minutes to boot until just a few weeks ago.

There seems to be some kind of a software issue going on because I can hear the Fusion drive working for 10-15 minutes after boot while sitting "idle". So, I'm reindexing Spotlight now to see if that helps.

I get a similar issue with an external ssd (but less extreme): my Macbook air takes ~10 min to boot, when it took only 30-40 sec with Big Sur (which was already longer than Catalina and Mojave)... quite frustrating, especially with external drive and dual boot as I have to reboot very often...

On Dec 7, I reported here that I had seen boot time to login screen go from about 45 sec to 4+ minutes.

But now, after 3 weeks of slow boot times, the machine has decided to revert to normal behavior: ~ 40 sec.

I didn't do anything to encourage this change in attitude, except threaten to put it through a couple of cycles in the dish washer.

@mrlinchen

Unfortunately not. Boot time even raised in my case from almost exactly 5 minutes (originally 30-40 seconds) now to 7 - 7:30 minutes.

Guess Apple wants all of us buying brand new MacBook Pros, iMacs and new too come iMac Pros ;-))

and therefore they implemented this delay in the boot process.

Reformatting my SSD drive in ASAF with a partition, and then loading Monterey on that, I am able to boot up very quickly (on a 2017 iMac). Prior to that, the internal Fusion drive was taking about 5-10 minutes to complete booting.

I am also experiencing the crazy lonnnnnng boot time on a late '15 iMac (from external SSD). Several of you have mentioned good boot speed from a Lacie enclosure. Are you allowed to post a link or a model number? I would like to see if it makes a difference. Thanks.

hi there sure you have to modify it but it does work and i have had not one poor boot speed at all, here is the one i have you can get them on ebay , this is thunderbolt 2 if you have thunderbolt 3 look for one in that. lacie d2 thunderbolt-2 | eBay , you will also need this adapter plate if you put a ssd in the enclosure, NEW 2.5" SSD to 3.5" Converter HDD Tray Caddy Hard Disk Drive Adapter 654540-001 | eBay. that will get you up and going, now if you are going to do a nvme drive in it thats a different adapter and not sure if they make them you will have to search. the Lacie is just that a drive enclosure, it was made to come apart and works quit well with good speed. Now keep in mind when you do this the USB 3 may or may not disable thats the usb 3 port on the drive not your system it was done so by design when SSD was used in these cases , as Lacie did have a ssd add on card for these dries at one time. they are no longer made so you have to do a full on modify , lacie support says it's supported , and should work with any ssd drive with the adapter i listed above , you can use any adapter like that if you find one cheeper the adapter brand don't matter. Good luck and have a safe happy holiday.

Thanks. It appears to be indeed a software but to me more interesting was the files stem used. I am on APFS and ever since I upgraded to Monetary, the boot up time from my external sandisk ssd has increased to 15-20 minutes atleast. The internal drive is still on Big Sur and boot up time from that is normal.

Pretty annoying and seems like apple has not even acknowledged it as problem. From external ssd, I have seen significant increase in kernel panics and random restarts. I upgraded to newly released upgrade to Monetary to absolutely no avail.

I am not familiar how to to file a ticket for it.

Thanks for the update about different enclosures. Think I'll wait though until there's an official statement from Apple on what is and what isn't compatible with MacOS Monterey. I've wasted enough time on it already.

Regardless of whether this issue is ever addressed, it’s a failure by Apple to either properly test MacOS before initial release or warn customers of incompatibilities. Some say it’s a cynical sales ploy to force customers to buy M1 Macs. Whatever the truth, MacOS Monterey obviously doesn’t work properly with some third party SSD drives and enclosures. At the very least we should have been warned about this prior to install.

Under the guise of efficiency & security, Apple seems to moving away from hardware customisation. Wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of that strategy. Bigger profits for Apple shareholders, but such machines will be thrown away and replaced more often which will generate a lot more computer waste. I wonder what percentage of customers actually recycle their Macs with Apple. Seems very outdated and not environmentally friendly, much better to have machines that can be upgraded with newer parts and last longer.

My brand new MacBook Air M1 rebooted 4 times (until now) in a row after upgrading to Monterey. Each time it took about 5 minutes to do that, except the last on when after five minutes I got a message "about 11 minutes to go". Hopefully, this will work fine once done, but this is not seamles experinece Apple users are used to.

Hi!

I also have this problem, and I am starting to suspect that there are many factors involved.

I have two iMacs (2017 and 2019) using external NVMEs using USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) connection. Both use ORICO cases with JSMicron chipset and a Crucial P1 NVME.

In iMac 2017, everything works beautifully. The system boots in under 30s, and I have a 10 Gbps connection.

In iMac 2019, I see the bug described here. It takes +5 min to boot. However, everything is fine after booting, and the 10 Gbps connection works well. I tried to swap the case to another one using Realtek chipset, I tried to switch to another USB-C 10 Gbps cable, and I also tried to use Apple's USB-C charging cable (iPad). In the latter, the boot process was extremely fast (25s or so). However, the external drive was connected using USB 2 speeds (480 Mbits/s). Hence, it was as slow as my internal Fusion drive.

Finally, this bug seems to be related to the USB3 driver in some configurations.

Another strange fact I observed is that when connecting with the Apple cable (slow speed), the configuration of my external monitor is saved. When I connect using my USB-C 10 Gbps cable (slow boot), I need to configure the external monitors every time I boot the system up.