On on of my macs, it's been taking forever to start lately. Now it just loads indefinitely, so here's what I'm thinking:
Slow connection?
It can share things from others on the network fairly fast, so I guess not.
Too many shared items?
Maybe, it does share the entire HD, but this hasn't been a problem in past.
It's also missing an IP.
But this also hasn't been a problem in past.
I share over an AirPort.
Any tales of conquering this sort of problem in the days of yore?
any settings changed, if mac classic any new control panels or extensions? New problems with the hard drive that would cause it to fail, corrupted control panel (if mac classic).
Yes indeed, I'll try that.
Not Classic, by the way.
What ever measure you take; make a back-up of the disk first! I´d recommend a total reformatting, writing back tha back-up and check if the symptoms are still there. The symptom *may* be a hard disk on it´s way out.
Friend's iMac Intel had this. Would stand forever with a grey screen and nothing else during booting. Restart on a CD/DVD/External Volume, set Start-Up disk to the internal disk, restart and everything was fine. Until booting after a nights rest, same procedure again. Got worse with time until it wouldn´t recognize anything for a *very* long while. Friend got mad; bought a new disk, opened the iMac, swapped disks, reinstalled and problems solved! Old internal disk continued to behave as a external disk in an USB cabinet, so it got binned after the final experiment session. End of rant!
Had something like this before. File-Sharing turned out to be the cause.
I had a lot of files on disk, sharing the whole disk. It also automatically shared any optical media I inserted (external Apple CD300). It was all something to do with the (invisible) Appleshare PDS file, it details everything that's shared and it can become corrupted. At startup, with Sharing enabled, the Mac is trying to bring this file up-to-date.
So, if you get a successful start, turn fileSharing off and restart. Also look in the "Servers" folder (in the System Folder) for servers it may be trying to automatically trying to connect to, clear them out. There may also be a load of PDF (not the type you think) in the "File Sharing" folder in the Preferences folder in the System Folder, trash them all (the PDF files). If the restart is good and quick, you may have found your culprit. You'll need something like ResEdit to make the "AppleShare PDS" file visible, trash it and empty the trash. Turn FileSharing back on and restart. A small delay while the file is built the first restart, restart again to test if it's fixed.
All thins applies to System 7 to OS9, but was more of an issue on System 7 Macs because of their slow speed.
