Mac Pro slow boot with black screen

[Lava Lamp Freak]

This problem just started last week. When I start the computer, either by restart or a cold boot, it takes 15 seconds before I hear the chime, and then it takes another 45 seconds before the grey screen comes up. From that point everything continues as normal, but this hang happens every single time now.

What is really frustrating is when I restart to boot into Windows, this hang causes my bluetooth keyboard to turn off, and it doesn't turn back on fast enough for the option key to bring up the boot menu. So, I have my usb keyboard plugged in now so that I can restart into bootcamp.

Any ideas? The most recent change was adding my OWC SSD to my Mac Pro, but that was a week before this issue started. This issue just started a week ago.

 

[erictooth]

Unplug all of your hard drives/SSDs, and see if it starts up to the grey screen quickly/normally. This should help narrow down the problem--sometimes, for whatever reason, some drives can slow down the drive detection during a boot.

 

[Lava Lamp Freak]

I just pulled all three of my drives from the computer, one at a time, and there was no change.

I also unplugged all usb devices, and there was no change.

I also pulled my upgraded memory and reinstalled the factory memory. No change.

I reset the PRAM. No Change.

I reset the SMC. No Change.

How long does the black screen normally last? I'm certain it was much quicker than this before last week, but I just started using Windows 7 last week, to play Rift. Before that my restarts were limited to OS updates, so I rarely restarted.

 

[initialsBB]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

Have you manually selected the OS X boot drive in system preferences / startup disk ?

 

[Lava Lamp Freak]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

Have you manually selected the OS X boot drive in system preferences / startup disk ?

Yes, my OS X drive is selected as the startup disk.

 

[Lava Lamp Freak]

I fixed the problem today. I pulled all three drives out and reset the PRAM a few times. Now it begins booting immediately after the chime.

 

[Lava Lamp Freak]

The problem returned.

After changing the startup disk to my Windows drive, I attempted to restart the computer. The Finder quit, but the computer didn't restart. When I tried to open up the Finder by clicking the icon in the dock, I got the error, "The Application Finder can't be opened. -10810" Further attempts to restart or shut down were futile.

I had to hold down the power button to get it to turn off. It booted into Windows just fine, and then I changed the startup disk back to Mac OS X. Upon restart, the long delay was back.

I reset the PRAM again, and now it is fine. It appears that the issue is caused by changing the startup disk with the boot camp control panel in Windows. I guess I'm going to have to stick with using the option key whenever I want to restart into Windows. I don't like doing that because most of the time my bluetooth keyboard doesn't turn on fast enough to catch the key being pressed.

I'm not sure if the Finder crash after setting Windows as my startup disk was a coincidence. I don't feel like testing it right now.