iBook startup lag

[darknight84]

Hey all, I really need your help on this one. This is my first iBook - Apple purchase EVER! and I am need some help on the start up problem. When it powers up I have to wait for a couple of minutes and it shows these two different icons.

First icon - Its an icon that starts flashing for abt 2 minutes of the globe

Seconds icon - Its a finder icon and then a question mark. Its very small and it looks like theres a folder of some sort in it.

If you understand what i mean then yeah...is this what its supposed to do? or can i fix this? im still not sure about all the stuff on my iBook but its getting there..Thanks.

[TAK]

This *could* be your Hard Drive. I know when my iBook G3 (Dual USB) started having problems, it took it forever to boot up and I had the exact same problems. My hard drive didn't die for a few months after that, but it was a sign. Run the Mac hardware check, then backup everything so in case your HD does fail then you are fine. I can't give any recommendation other than reinstalling OSX to see if that will fix the problem.

[Danamania]

Originally posted by darknight84@Mar 29 2005, 03:15 AM
Hey all, I really need your help on this one. This is my first iBook - Apple purchase EVER! and I am need some help on the start up problem. When it powers up I have to wait for a couple of minutes and it shows these two different icons.

First icon - Its an icon that starts flashing for abt 2 minutes of the globe

Seconds icon - Its a finder icon and then a question mark. Its very small and it looks like theres a folder of some sort in it.

If you understand what i mean then yeah...is this what its supposed to do? or can i fix this? im still not sure about all the stuff on my iBook but its getting there..Thanks.

It looks like the iBook is trying to network boot, and is spending time hunting for a net boot server. You'll need to set the startup disk to be your HD.

Can you boot at all, eventually? If you can, go into System Preferences->Startup Disk and set it to your OS X drive.

If you can't, try holding down the Option key while booting, and select the OS X drive, then do the above startup disk setting.

dana

[darknight84]

Problem solved...thanks for that Dana!

[kim jong il]

Had almost an identical problem just a couple of nights ago on my folks G3 iBook. I decided to update their system software while they had access to my ADSL. I ran the software update and downloaded the 10.3.8 combo update (and a pile of other components totaling around 200 MB). Upon completion I restarted only to be confronted by the globe icon in the middle of the screen. Suspecting that it was looking for a boot volume over the network I unplugged the ethernet cable (probably unnecessary) powered it down and attempted a restart. Within moments I had the folder icon with a question mark instead so I knew it was and had been looking for a boot volume. I decided to boot off the install disk and repair permissions. Before I could do this it found the internal HD and away it went. After startup it took quite a few minutes of the HD chuckling away to finish all its bits and pieces after this (optimising HD~updating the prebinding I guess) When it had finished I went to the system preferences selected the internal HD as the boot volume and then ran the disk utility to repair the permissions that were all over the place (actually this is a huge exageration; about eight items needed repairs) and then restarted it again. Worked flawlessly.