24" Alu iMac takes forever to boot up. Help!

[cmcclure16]

I purchased a 24" 2.8 GHz Alu iMac with 2 GB of RAM at the beginning of the month. Within the past week or so it has been taking ages to boot up. When I power on I get the signature Macintosh sound but then I just get a white screen. It will stay like that for a good 3 or 4 minutes before I can get the grey Apple logo to show up. (Sometimes it will just stay on the white screen unless I move the mouse or press keys on the keyboard after a few minutes, other times will show up by itself but still takes a few minutes.) This happened while in Tiger but I upgraded (did an archive & install) to Leopard yesterday and it is still doing it. I don't seem to have any problems with the OS. Just the boot up. I only did an Archive & install with Leopard so that may be why I still have it. I could try doing an Erase & Install but I was really hoping to stay away from that, as I don't want to have to reinstall all my apps and all my settings. Anyone think that may fix it?

Any suggestions as how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

 

[nando2323]

Try clearing the PRAM hold (Command+Option+P+R) when you power on the computer. If you do it correctly it will reboot itself right after the apple sound.

 

[cmcclure16]

Try clearing the PRAM hold (Command+Option+P+R) when you power on the computer. If you do it correctly it will reboot itself right after the apple sound.

I tried that and it took forever for it to decide to restart and then it still took forever to load.

 

[cmcclure16]

anybody else? The PRAM thing didn't work.

 

[nando2323]

Try swapping your RAM chips. Take one out boot it up, still slow swap with the other try again.