My iMac, OS 10.7.5, is abnormally slow on start-up, taking many minutes for my password sign-in window to show up. I've run Disk Permissions and have verified my hard drive and all is in order. What do I do to start up my Mac in a normal manner?

How much free space do you have on the system drive?

Allan

That doesn't appear to be the problerm then.

Try http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/performance.html

Allan

Also is your internal HD set up as the startup disk? Check in System Preferences - Startup Disk.

The question mark is just part of the icon.

First try this. Shutdown and unplug the machine. Hold the power button for a count of 20. Plug the machine back in and then start your mac.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.

Step 1

Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Enter "BOOT_TIME" (without the quotes) in the search box. Note the timestamps of those log messages, which refer to the times when the system was booted. Now clear the search box and scroll back in the log to the last boot time when you had the problem. Select the messages logged after the boot, during the time something abnormal was happening. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).

For example, if the problem is a slow startup taking three minutes, post the messages timestamped within three minutes after the boot time, not before. Please include the BOOT_TIME message at the beginning of the log extract.

If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don’t post many repetitions of the same message.

When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Step 2

Still in Console, look under System Diagnostic Reports for crash or panic logs, and post the entire contents of the most recent one, if any. In the interest of privacy, I suggest you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if present (it may not be.) Please don’t post shutdownStall, spin, or hang logs — they're very long and not helpful.

Hi Linc Davis,

I have a similar problem. I have run the console as you suggest, how is best to show you the console logs on start-up?

Hi linc davis, i am facing this problem with my imac. It gets on hold for about 7 minutes, with no keyboards or mouse clicks work.

I just ran hd test, and everything is fine.

Hope someone can help me. Thanks a lot.