iMac bootup taking 15-30 minutes?

[CamQuartr]

I have a fall 2009 i5 27" which I bought refurbished late august of 2010

So the other day i started working on a new final cut project. The total clips I used came out to about 50 gigs. The next day I turned on my computer and it took an abnormally long time to boot up (about 15-20 minutes) , I figured it was because of these huge files. Last night i finished the project, and cleared out everything (I also cleared out another 130 gigs of my HDD), and when I booted up my computer today it took about 30 minutes to boot up. My computer eventually does boot up, and works perfectly fine. Why is this? Thanks

 

[gnasher729]

I have a fall 2009 i5 27" which I bought refurbished late august of 2010

So the other day i started working on a new final cut project. The total clips I used came out to about 50 gigs. The next day I turned on my computer and it took an abnormally long time to boot up (about 15-20 minutes) , I figured it was because of these huge files. Last night i finished the project, and cleared out everything (I also cleared out another 130 gigs of my HDD), and when I booted up my computer today it took about 30 minutes to boot up. My computer eventually does boot up, and works perfectly fine. Why is this? Thanks

Something is wrong with your computer, so I'd make sure that I have an up-to-date backup. I would suspect a hard drive close to failing, so the first thing I'd do is create a Time Machine backup. These big files shouldn't make a difference really. Once you have a backup, you could try booting without a network connection (I have seen cases where a Mac waited ages for a broken server on a network to respond, but that is very, very rare).

 

[djc6]

I would suspect a hard drive close to failing

I also suspect hard drive failure. Focus on backups; once that is done, try running SMARTReporter and see if anything is amiss:

http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/