[jszrules]

Hi, sometimes when I restart my machine (15'' 800MHz 'desklamp' iMac G4 running 10.4.10), it hangs for a long time on the gray Apple startup screen. Sometimes it lasts 5-10 minutes before making it to the blue screen. Other times, it goes longer (most recently 30 min) before I hit the power button to restart again which seems to temporarily fix the problem...it breezes through the gray screen in under a minute. There doesn't seem to be a cause-and-effect relationship with this behavior and installing new software requiring a restart.

My question is does this behavior indicate something serious? Should I expect this to happen with a 5-year-old computer? Any housekeeping procedures I can run to keep things healthy? Thanks.

[Art Vandelay]

Check your system.log in the Console after it happens. Look at the time stamps to see where the delay is occurring. One likely cause is that the system is checking/fixing your disk which can take a while if you have a lot of data.

[jszrules]

Thanks for pointing me in that direction. The following portion of activity from the Console's system.log repeats for about 30 minutes. I don't know what any of it means, so please let me know if this means anything to you. Thanks!

Sep 23 12:50:50 localhost /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Sep 23 12:50:50 localhost /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: session setup failed (status = 226), launched by init = 1\n
Sep 23 12:50:50 localhost /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: loginwindow arguement passed = console\n
Sep 23 12:50:50 localhost launchd: /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow port /dev/console exited abnormally: Abort trap
Sep 23 12:50:50 localhost launchd: getty repeating too quickly on port /dev/console, sleeping

[dowNNshift]

Because generally speaking it's not a good idea to be tinkering around in the /System/ folder, you may want to consider rebuilding your directory using a disk utility such as Alsoft Disk Warrior 4. This will defragment the disk data, in addition to also rebuild your entire directory and correct permissions.

Running Disk Warrior will definitely make a noticeable impact if you haven't clean installed the Mac OS in several years. Make sure you purchase version 4, since it is Universal Binary.

[pinenuts]

Go into Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) and run Verify and Repair permissions.

Try again.

How much RAM do you have? How much available hard drive space?

[jszrules]

Thanks for the replies. At the time of restart, there was about 6-8GB left of storage on the machine. I also have 256MB RAM.

I have DiskWarrior 3, but haven't run it in at least a few years. Do you really think I need version 4 with my 5-year-old machine, as Universal Binary means nothing to me?

Does the segment in my last post indicate a specific piece the startup is getting hung up on?

[outthere]

i'm having the same problem here. i was messing around with the disk utility app. (try to clean some space up using the Erase option,) then it happened after i restarted the machine.
i'm downloading the disk warrior now hehe

[peeb]

I'm rather afraid your drive might be about to fail - you might want to look at the SMART statistics, and certainly make a backup. You could even try booting from an external drive and seeing if you can replicate the problem - I'm guessing you won't be able to...