“Steven Seiden wrote in with a situation he’s having with his Mac: ‘My Mac hangs at a black screen for almost 45 seconds after producing the startup chime before showing the Apple logo. It’s really annoying! Is there any way to fix this?'” Glenn Fleishman writes for Macworld.
“I’ve seen this before with faulty RAM, as a startup test doesn’t fail, but it generates errors that aren’t severe enough to halt launch,” Fleishman writes.
“However,” Fleishman writes, “in subsequent email, Steven said he has an 2013 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM, and that model cannot be upgraded by a user (or even Apple). ”
If you experience this startup delay, read how to fix it in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s a simple fix for an issue that can be maddening.
Oddly enough, the Mac Pro I’ve had for years just started doing this recently (like a few weeks ago).
I assumed it was a peripheral (it’s a nMP) so my desk looks like a rat’s nest of USB and TB Cables.
I somehow really doubt it’s bad RAM. Any MDN readers have some other ideas? I’ll admit I’ve done zero troubleshooting. When I get a chance I’ll do the usual, zap PRAM, disconnect peripherals, shift-boot, then finally run the single user mode RAMtest CLI app.
Update: Zapping PRAM fixed the pause for me. I just hadn’t tried, because I restart so rarely that the pause wasn’t too much of a bother. More of a “oh, that’s different.”
For others: Zapping PRAM = From a dead boot, hold cmd-opt-P-R, and continue to hold until the third chime you hear.
This happened to me a few months ago and I checked my Startup Disk settings and sure enough there was no disk selected.
Chose my OS drive, problem solved. Nice tip!
The problem I had is somehow Disk journalling got turned off. It was especially a problem if the computer didn’t manage a graceful shutdown. Once I turned it back on, startup was much faster and reliable.