Can a 210Mb disk0s1 volume be a reason why my MBP is slow to boot...?

Question

Level 1

30 points

Can a 210Mb disk0s1 volume be a reason why my MBP is slow to boot...?

... Or is it simply the Mac equivalent of Windows' MBR?

Hi all!

I was browsing my "About this Mac" informations, and stumbled upon a strange entry in "Serial ATA": there, I found I actually had two volumes, or disks; one was labeled "disk0s2", and is my startup, Macintosh HD volume. The other one is labeled "disk0s01", is only 209.7Mb worth, and seems to precede the main volume in boot order (or maybe I got it all wrong; if that's the case, gloves off!). Could that mean that on startup, this small volume is the first to be read by the processor and logic board, only to be deemed non bootable, which leads to the second, much bigger volume, to be examined and booted?

Or is quite normal, since maybe this small volume hosts a partition table or some such thing?

MacBook Pro 2006, Mac OS X (10.6.5), 2GB RAM - Longing for a 17" MacBook Pro with the i5 chip...

Posted on Dec 11, 2010 4:07 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Dec 11, 2010 7:51 AM in response to OneCatFamily

OneCatFamily wrote:
... Or is it simply the Mac equivalent of Windows' MBR?

That's normal. I suspect but haven't confirmed that that volume contains the "Darwin" system that underlies OS X:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

To investigate a slow boot process, see how many items are in your account's "startup item" list. You might also launch the Console utility and look for messages that might explain the slow boot.

Reply

Answer 2

OneCatFamily Author

Level 1

30 points

Dec 12, 2010 8:40 AM in response to William-Boyd-Jr

Thanks William! I'm going to investigate the Darwin matter in a moment. I've already checked the items in the Startup menu in my account. Nothing seems out of place, plus, the major loss of time during boot occurs during the grey spinning wheel phase. The grey screen appears at once, but then, I get this grey spinning wheel for ages (about twenty to thirty seconds, more like...), then a blue screen, very luminous, then my desktop. The whole process takes up to one full minute, as opposed to the mere thirty seconds I'd become accustomed to with Tiger. I tried booting in verbose, and strangely enough, startup seemed faster, but that could be quite subjective. I don't get the "Waiting for DSMOS" lag some users have been experiencing, and save from applying the hacks that can be found here and there (I found them here: http://instantitunes.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/fix-slow-start-up-or-shutdown-issu e-for-snow-leopard/) from time to time, I don't get any result in speeding up my MBP on startup... 😟

Reply

Answer 3

Dec 12, 2010 11:31 AM in response to OneCatFamily

OneCatFamily wrote:
The grey screen appears at once, but then, I get this grey spinning wheel for ages (about twenty to thirty seconds, more like...), then a blue screen, very luminous, then my desktop. The whole process takes up to one full minute, as opposed to the mere thirty seconds I'd become accustomed to with Tiger.

Unless you reboot your Mac a number of times a day, if you don't see any troublesome messages in the Console log, I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to speed up the boot process.

Reply

Answer 4

R C-R

Level 6

17,782 points

Dec 12, 2010 11:45 AM in response to OneCatFamily

FWIW, the 209.7 MB partition is the EFI one that is normally present on all Intel Mac startup drives. It isn't actually used for anything during the boot process into OS X, & thus is not responsible for slow startups, but Apple says to leave it alone.

Darwin is the open source part of OS X & is integrated into it in the same places that the proprietary parts are.

Reply

Answer 5

OneCatFamily Author

Level 1

30 points

Dec 13, 2010 9:56 PM in response to OneCatFamily

Many thanks to those who have answered this question! I now know a lot more about the system installed on my machine, thanks to you guys!

Reply