I mentioned in previous threads my work computer was taking 10 minutes or more to reach the desktop after typing in the password. The boot was more or less normal but once the log in screen came up entering the pass word and it took 10 plus minutes to move to the desktop. Today after delivery of the show I switched startup drives, all coming from the same hard drive on a different partition, and the computer booted normally taking maybe 30 seconds from entering the pass word to get to the desktop.
While on the other startup drive partition I repaired permissions on the problematic startup drive and also verified the disk which all came out okay. Bouncing back to the problem startup drive took 3 minutes to get from log in to desktop. I then took a new drive and partitioned it the same way the original startup drive is with a 4TB drive into 10 partitions. I used Carbon Copy Clone to clone the problematic startup partition to the new drive. Once that was done I started up on the newly created partition and the computer booted normally taking the usual 30ish seconds from log in to desk top. Clearly there is an issue on the original startup partition.
I'm curious when a drive is dying I would think a certain partition might have some physical damage that wouldn't appear in other partitions. This would explain why when I booted to a different startup partition on the same drive it worked normally. Now I'm wondering what is happening in the problematic partition to make it take 10 or more minutes to go from log in to desktop? Once it finally boots it seems to work normally so what is holding things up? Will a failing drive or partition keep retrying to read a section until it gets it right? That would explain the long time to get to desktop. I would think if it was physical damage that made reading data impossible the drive would never boot all the way. Perhaps there are iffy sectors that are requiring a bunch of rereads but eventually the data is retrieved. Do drives have some sort of internal error correction that would make them behave this way?
Given cloning the drive to a new drive seems to be working normally I would think all the data was accessible for Carbon Copy Clone to make the new drive partition that works properly. If the problematic startup partition had bad code that was making it take a long time to boot to the desktop I would think a clone of it would exhibit the same issue but after a few test boots the new partition seems to be working correctly.
Bottom line would I be correct to postulate that the problem startup partition has sectors or section on that partition that have become problematic to accurately and reliably read data so there is a bunch of rereading going on that makes booting to the desktop take a long time? It seems the new drive is solving my issue but now I won't to know why for future deadline fueled fun like I've had the last week.
John Moore Barking Trout Productions Studio City, CA bigfish@pacbell.net
