Using a startup drive from a Mac Mini in a Mac Pro

[frjonah]

I've been forced into booting my Mac Pro from a SL startup drive from a now defunct Mac Mini and the boot time is, well, S L O W ... like 50s with a long lag before the Apple even shows up. Everything seems to work fine and, of course, "About This Mac" identifies all the hardware correctly, but the boot time is driving me crazy... is this to be expected?

Reloading the OS isn't a very simple option since the Optical Drive is defunct and attempts at installing from an Install-Disk-Restored flash drive aren't working for some odd reason.

Thank you in advance... without help from this forum, I wouldn't have even gotten this far.

 

[666sheep]

Stock Mini drive (5400 rpm and usually slow) won't be booting as fast as regular 7200 rpm drive but it shouldn't be that slow.
To shorten boot time to possible minimum zap PRAM then set your boot disk to this Mini-salvaged one in System Preferences. External USB drives connected to MP (if you have any) could also affect boot time.

 

[hfg]

Why don't you clone your slow Mini drive to one of the fast Mac Pro 3.5" disk drives using Disk Utility "restore" or a cloning program such as CCC?

 

[frjonah]

Stock Mini drive (5400 rpm and usually slow) won't be booting as fast as regular 7200 rpm drive but it shouldn't be that slow.

Why don't you clone your slow Mini drive to one of the fast Mac Pro 3.5" disk drives using Disk Utility "restore" or a cloning program such as CCC?

I probably should have mentioned that I actually had an SSD in there that was a clone of the Mac Mini drive, and it was STILL booting super slow... I finally had a breakthrough though... it turned out that my thumb drive clone of the SL install disk had become corrupted... I re-restored the SL disk to the thumb drive and it booted to the install without difficulties... boot time is now around 8s... much, much better!

Round two should be interesting: I have 2 x Xeon 5355s en route along with 16gb of RAM... I'm hoping to breathe new life into this old dinosaur

Thank you guys for the help!

 

[frjonah]

I'm starting to think that the IDE channel might be damaged on my machine... I previously thought the Superdrive failed but have since observed that every IDE device I try to connect is invisible to the system, even when connecting those same devices through a USB-IDE device makes them visible.

Maybe it's just disconnected from the other MB, though... hard to see since I believe it's plugged in behind the fan assy.