Macbook 7'1 taking a long time to boot, OS X 10.6.8

Have you looked at your login items recently? There could be items trying to be loaded that cause conflicts. Go into system preferences, and in accounts, look at your login id and see when login items are loaded. I have a separate ID named 'troubleshooting id' that has no login items, in case I need to test the system.

You might haver an issue with some stuff in PRAM not being quite right. You can reset it (without causing any harm at all) by turning on the computer and as soon as you hear the startup tone, press Cmd-Opt-P-R. Keep holding the keys all through the reboot that will happen until you hear the second startup tone. At that point, you can release it. Startup should, hopefully, be much faster.

You may have to readjust some of your preferences, such as volume and screen brightness.

Hiya.

Okay, other things you can try:

* Use Disk Utility to repair your disk permissions,

* Boot to Safe Mode once by holding the shift key upon hearing the startup tone, then reboot normally,

* Boot to Single User Mode by pressing Cmd-S upon hearing the startup tone and then running "fsck -fy" at the prompt and then "reboot" when the check is finished,

* If booting to Single User Mode reports problems that cannot be fixed, boot to an OS X installation DVD by holding C upon hearing the startup tone and then choosing Disk Utility from the Utilities menu; try repairing the volume again.

Each of these steps will affect different areas. Disk permissions can slow down or even stop some processes from working correctly, so boot times can be affected by time-outs of processes during startup. Safe Mode forces various caches to be cleared, so its initial start will be somewhat slower than normal, but after OS X rebuilds these caches, start times should improve. Finally, Single User Mode/DVD boot disk repairs can get an unhappy volume back in shape prior to failure of the file system.

Other issues can be related to peripheral connections. Loose or flaky connectors for speakers, Ethernet cables, external monitors and various USB and/or FireWire devices can all slow down startup as the machine struggles to make sense of unstable signals. If you have any external devices connected, give those connections a thorough check.

Finally, if nothing above works, a trip to the Genius Bar might be in order.

Best of luck to you!

I'm having a similar slowdown problem. I'm pretty sure my powerbook was booting pretty quickly when I got it earlier this year but, after a couple of updates, it has slowed way down. From the time I hit the power button to the time the Apple logo appears is 39 seconds, and it's a total of 65 seconds till my desktop first shows up. I may have to locate another hard drive and reload the original system and compare times.

I also keep hearing this quiet but noticeable metallic grinding sound every 10 or 20 seconds that sounds like it's coming from the hard drive, is that normal?

Doesn't sound right (assuming this is just not the soft "tapping" of the heads seeking). Perhaps the drive is on it's way to failure so whenever you access it any additional head movement due it whatever problem it's having is adding to the access time thus slowing all such accesses down.

Make sure you have backups while you can still make those backups!

repair permissions with a program called snow leopard cache cleaner

If you want to repair permissions use Disk Utility, not some 3rd party app.

Do you know of any hard drive testing programs out there that I can use to shed some light on this?

Most disk programs like Disk Utility, Disk Warrior, etc. generally attempt to repair the damage and don't go into specifics in any detail. Doesn't Disk Utility repair complain about anything? If it doesn't, count youself lucky for the moment and create those backups ASAP.

Do you know of any hard drive testing programs out there that I can use to shed some light on this? It doesn't matter if it's for osx, windows, or debian/ubuntu I have all 3 on here.

Download Smart Utility from http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php . That will give you a reading on the SMART indicators and an overall health indicator on your hard drive.

What does the green - yellow - red health indicator say?