My Macbook is suddenly slower... Need help!

I was about to install Windows XP in my Macbook, and since the 5GB partition I made for it was NOT recognized, I accidentally chose my Mac drive partition to be reformatted instead (all of it). I panicked after a few minutes and stopped everything midway (read: I forcefully turned the laptop off and ejected the Windows install disc). My Macbook went haywire for a while until I figured out how to reformat everything and start from scratch (ouch).

Now I'm all good, except my startup is suddenly and noticeably slower. Before, once I press the power button, the gray apple screen with the "loading" circle appears, together with the startup sound. Now, the sound plays over a black screen before the gray screen appears and the loading takes longer. Before, my desktop would appear almost instantaneously, now it flashes a blue screen before my wallpaper shows, followed by the top taskbar and then the dock.

I was wondering if I may have done something when I stopped the Windows midway from formatting my entire HD? Is it possible that I left some "fragments" of Windows or partitions or formatting somewhere in the HD 'coz the whole process was disrupted? What can I do about this?

(If I'm helpless, I can have it checked in an iStore. It's part of the warranty right?)

 

What does Disk Utility report? If you do have a fragment of corrupt XP partition on your HD, you will see it on the left hand side of Disk Utility. You can then Erase it.

I'm assuming your formatted your entire HD and reinstalled Leopard? If not, then I would recommend you to carry out an Archive and Install of Leopard. That way, a brand new OS X will be installed on your system, with all your user settings and applications intact.

 

I see a '149GB Fujitsu blah blah' on the left side, with a sub-menu that has my HD in it, nothing else.

My HD was partly formatted for Windows by accident but I stopped it midway. I followed some online instructions and I erased the Windows partition, but there's still an MS-DOS Fat option in the dropdown menu of the Volume format (together with Mac OS Extended Journaled, etc.) Is that normal?

Other than that, I reinstalled Mac OS from scratch. I forgot what I did this morning; what process would I have done to format it? Maybe I already did...

 

To format your Mac OS X, boot from the Leopard Installation DVD and follow the instructions. When it asks you how you want to install OS X, choose the bottom option for a format, or the middle option for an archive and install. If you did format, you should have chosen the bottom option.

So there are only two items in the left menu in Disk Utility? If so, what does the information at the bottom of the screen say when you select your HD (not the 149GB Fujitsu)?

 

(How exactly do I boot from the installation dvd? I know something about pressing 'C' but not exactly how or when.)

HD:
Mount Point : /
Capacity : 148.7 GB (159,697,911,808 Bytes)
Format : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Available : 130.8 GB (140,413,673,472 Bytes)
Owners Enabled : Yes
Used : 18.0 GB (19,284,238,336 Bytes)
Number of Folders : 62,759
Number of Files : 285,737


149GB Fujitsu (for good measure):
Disk Description : FUJITSU MHY2160BH Media
Total Capacity : 149.1 GB (160,041,885,696 Bytes)
Connection Bus : Serial ATA 2
Write Status : Read/Write
Connection Type : Internal
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Verified
Partition Map Scheme : GUID Partition Table

 

iirc insert the disc, then hold down 'option' during a restart until you get the options screen

 

How exactly did you format your drive the first time round? Anyway, just put the Leopard DVD into your Mac, restart your Mac, and hold down the Alt key before the machine restarts up until you see the menu, where you will be able to select which device to boot from. Or, you could hold down C instead of Alt to bypass the menu.

 

Now I remember...

The Windows installation didn't recognize that I had already made a 5GB partition for it, and I ended up formatting the entire HD instead. I was given two options on how I want it formatted, something like: 1) NTFS (Quick), 2) NTFS (something about being more "complete"). I chose the second option, wondered why it was taking forever for to format 5GB, and realized that 131000MB is NOT 5GB so I canceled it midway.

Sometime later, I learned about going to Disk Utility from the Mac OS X dvd went to the Erase tab, and tried to Erase the MS-DOS Fat from the format volume and it did this partitioning of some sort and I ended up with an 'Untitled HD' which I then named as my MacBook HD.

 

If you are still having complications, just do what Budding is telling you to and do a total reformat of you macbook. Even if you think you already did something... you are not clear on what you did and are still having problems so you should look up precise directions on how to to it and get it done. Start from scratch. Trust me it will prevent any other small nuisances that can arise if you try fixing it without doing a clean reformat. That is just my take on it...

 

Sounds to me like your must have damaged a part of the file system when you formatted using the XP disc. Note that OS X (HFS+) and Windows (NTFS) use different file system which are totally incompatible with one another, which might be why your OS X is taking ages to boot.

 

I assume your formatted your entire HD and reinstalled Leopard? If not, then I would recommend you to carry out an Archive and Install of Leopard. That way, a brand new OS X will be installed on your system, with all your user settings and applications intact.

 

and if that does not work for, i will advice you to take it to the nearest service center as it is part of the warranty.

 

Thats because I already did reformat it and started from scratch, even before I posted here. That's when my startup started going really slow.

 

Yeah, I've already done that, still nothing. I'll be bringing it to an Apple center today, I hope they find something.

 

Hi, Ive already tried all the solutions that I found on the Net regarding this problem: Single-user mode, PRAM reset, taking the batt out, etc. Nothing helped. I read that maybe there's still a 200MB Fat32 partition left hidden somewhere and I'm banking on the fact that maybe that could be the one causing the problem. I just can't find any way to delete it, much less find it. Any ideas?

 

If you have just reformatted then has your Spotlight indexing completed yet? My understanding is on a fresh Tiger/Leopard installation, the Spotlight has to spend time cataloguing every file on your HDD first so that could explain initial slowness. The other thing is that it might just take some time to build up your caches again. I find that after OS updates or security updates, my Mac boots slower for the next few reboots before getting into the gear again.

 

You have tried formatting using the OS X installation disc right? A format using the Windows installation disc is totally different.

From the sounds of it, if the slowdown is happening even before OS X loads, then it is probably not Spotlight's indexing that's causing it.

 

I guess there's nothing wrong my Macbook after all. (Yes, I reformatted using the installation disk. But I'll probably do it again to be sure.)

I already took it to two Apple centers and they said it was perfectly normal for my Mac to boot that way (with knowing smiles too). I even watched videos on youtube for boot times and everything was similar to mine. I feel bad... It's just that before all this happened, my Mac would boot in 10 seconds, now it's down to around 34. Is that still good?

 

Dude my thinkpad takes over 4 mins to boot... feel lucky. If you really want that 10 sec boot time try doing the clean install again.

 

It is rather strange that a messed up Boot Camp installation could slow your boot time by that much. My Macbook takes about 10 seconds to reach the Login screen, and about 40 seconds to load everything else up. However, that is because I have a lot of stuff loading on start. With a clean install, you should be looking at 10-20 seconds of booting. Quite strange that Disk Utility shows an all clean, I wouldn't expect that after a messed up Boot Camp - it should at least show up as Unallocated space or something.