Removed Superdrive. Slow booting.

Question

Level 1

0 points

Removed Superdrive. Slow booting.

Hi everybody,

Recently I removed SuperDrive from my Macbook 2009 Unibody (it jammed the DVD inside and stopped responding completely).

Poor Superdrive is now on permanent vacation in a landfill.

Anyway.

I run both 10.8 and Bootcamp XP. With Mountain Lion everything seems right.

But if booting XP, the initial EFI grey screen hangs for exactly 2:30-2:40 minutes. Then continues to boot normally.

Something is wrong with it. It feels like it's desperetely trying to enumerate the a gone Superdrive.

I tried resetting SMC and other tricks without any luck.

Any ideas how to fix it?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)

Posted on Oct 31, 2012 4:16 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 31, 2012 4:19 PM in response to ku1ku

XP is looking for the 'superdrive' for bootup purposes, you must either find a way to negate it's search for the superdrive in windows setting or buy a new superdrive and install it. Thats all i can suggest for you sorry 😟 Hope this helped.

Reply

Answer 2

Shootist007

Level 6

16,703 points

Oct 31, 2012 4:25 PM in response to AppleSupport2012

AppleSupport2012 wrote:

XP is looking for the 'superdrive' for bootup purposes, you must either find a way to negate it's search for the superdrive in windows setting or buy a new superdrive and install it. Thats all i can suggest for you sorry 😟 Hope this helped.

XP should not be looking for any drive that is not physically installed in the system. Actually XP shouldn't even be running under Mountain Lion. It must of been a carry over from Snow Leopard or even installed on the system when it had Leopard installed.

Get a virtual machine software program and Migrate that install of XP into a Virtual Machine. Then you can get rid of Boot Camp and run both OS X and Windows at the same time.

Reply

Answer 3

Oct 31, 2012 4:35 PM in response to Shootist007

True, however that is clearly what it is doing. It may be additional code left over from a previous install that did allow XP. But i agree, use migrate or even Parallells to use an alternate OS.

Reply

Answer 4

ku1ku Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 31, 2012 5:44 PM in response to AppleSupport2012

I always loved this sort of answers!

You want to change a flat tire in your car - and someone is suggesting you to repaint your house. Awesome!

Anyway, waiting 2 minutes is not a big deal. I can live with that 🙂

Reply

Answer 5

Shootist007

Level 6

16,703 points

Oct 31, 2012 5:55 PM in response to ku1ku

Suit yourself. You are the one asking the question.

Reply

Answer 6

silvergc

Level 4

1,002 points

Nov 2, 2012 2:18 PM in response to ku1ku

in XP go into device manager and see if there is an entry for the optical drive. If there is make sure it is disabled. You should also check startup processes to make sure something isn't trying to access the non-existant drive. use msconfig from the start --> cmd prompt.

Reply

Answer 7

ku1ku Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 18, 2012 9:26 AM in response to silvergc

Thanks for advice, mate!

The trick is that delay is happening on EFI grey screen. Way before any XP loader fires up.

Still ploughing through.

Reply

Answer 8

temakaz

Level 1

0 points

Dec 22, 2012 7:55 AM in response to ku1ku

Same problem. Need to use Windows now and this 2 minutes delay really confusing. I have SSD and expect fast booting 😉 Don't want to place superdrive back. Is there a solution?

Reply