Slow boots far post-installation

[i2pro]

We are editing digital video on our hackintosh, its a GB H77-DS3H, 3.49 i7 Sandy, and a Radeon 6850 1 GB. It has been a killing machine as we have a fast setup of 16gb ram, decent HD (NOT SSD like we would like), until recently. We do move this machine around a bit from home to office depending on what we are editing / doing, but no drops or bumps or anything like that. Nothing really more to describe about the rig except we use AE CS5 with some plugins and we do the editing in Mac OSX Lion through FCP7.0.

So, recently our booting has been really slow. For a long while it was like 4 to 5 seconds, which was awesome. We just finished turning it on about a half hour ago with two boots just sitting in the Mac load screen for over 5 minutes, rebooted, same, and 3 booted to get in but it wasn't the usual speed, more like 45 seconds compared to 4 or 5. The third boot was different only in that we switched monitor ports and two usb ports around for keyboard and mouse.

Are we behind on updates? Is this a sign of worse things to come or just a blip in the otherwise steady radar? Just concerned because it is our main editing rig and would be potentially disastrous if it suddenly gave way / had a fatal HD error or something.

Any feedback is appreciated, thank you.

 

[dcharlesworth]

This is likely not your fix, but it just worked for me. I was moving my rig around from offices to another office, and my CPU cooler had become dislodged, and slightly loose. It would hang while trying to boot, and when it did boot, after many attempts, it would just shut down shortly thereafter.

I figured it was something physical that had happened, because I had 2 boot drive clones, that were verified working, and it was doing the same thing with those as well.

If this is a work rig, that you need to have working, You should definitely have a verified boot clone, and obviously data backup. Just make sure when you clone the HDD that you run the necessary tonymac files to get it to boot. Having 2 boot clones, really helped me not lose my mind completely, when things went sour. I knew that if need be I could be up and running quickly, or boot off my MBP, and also access data.

Just my .02 good luck with your troubles.