Most common factor in boot times

so can someone please tell me how winlinmac manages his phenomnal time and someofthe others. Does anybody know Zephys boot time hes on nforce4

its iokitwait timeout or whateva its called that always causes the biggest hang. The interesting thing is that the install image im building boots in seconds. With no iokitwait timeout. Also I dont know if this has any bearing but both systems I'm running OSX on the floppy lights are permanently on. Any Ideas.

i think its the motherboard, my former PC's mobo had a constant boot time of 1:13 min on the same pc the windows has a boot time of only 15 sec

AppleNForceATA doesn't support SATA2 with 300MB/s. SATA is even slower than IDE. Leopard has more drivers than Tiger, so it needs a longer boot time at all. My Tiger 10.4.7 using AppleVIAATA.kext and an ATA-133 IDE HD was amazing fast with great Xbench disk scores.

I'll test Firewire 800 next time, not for booting but for standard use.

If you boot with -v you should be able to see what causes the big delay.

If your hardware is configured and supported well it definitely shouldn't take more than a minute to boot up the machine.

Could it be possible to reactivate AppleVIAATA.kext in Leopard? I tested it but can't remember what happened, either it crashed or the SATA HD's waeren't detected. I always had the feeling that HD SATA access was faster with AppleVIAATA.kext. It was used before AppleNForceATA was out.

Try deleting /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHWSensor.kext then your kextcache and reboot

This worked on Tiger for a lot of people with long boot times.

@LawlessPPCits iokitwait timeout or whateva its called that always causes the biggest hang. The interesting thing is that the install image im building boots in seconds. With no iokitwait timeout. Also I dont know if this has any bearing but both systems I'm running OSX on the floppy lights are permanently on. Any Ideas.

I have tried everything to cut my boot-time(currently about 1 min and 10 seconds), used different versions of AppleViaAta kext, a version of AppleOnBoardSata kext which was modified for sb450, and the appleatiata kext, and I always get the iokitwait problem, and always about the same time to boot.
Now I just tried installing your Lawless distro, and unfortunately it didn´t help at all, the boot time was about 1 minute 20 seconds, and I still got the iokitwait error.

My machine is Acer Aspire 5104wlmi, with AMD Turion x2 TL-56, ati 1100 xpress chipset, SB450, S-ATA 150...

EDIT

Okey... now I found that the IOKitWait timeout is definitely caused by the IOATAFamily.kext, on my machine. If I boot on my external USB disk, without the IOATAFamily.kext, then I don´t get the IOKitWait thing, but then I don´t get access to my internal disk either... :-s

I am trying different version of IOATAFamily.kext, as well as just different plugins into IOATAFamily, in hope of finding a solution that gives me access to my internal drive but without the iokitwait…

If you guys have any ideas/suggestions, I would appreciate it.

- Ztardust -

I don't know if that helps, but I've deleted my kext-cache at the very beginning and then used OnyX thoroughly, to clean the whole install, and now I have this short boot time with 10.5.5 of about 20sec.

And ACPI works pretty well here for me with 300MB/s... so maybe it varys by the Bios of the boards, and not the chipsets themselves.

Yeah... well, my machine(Acer Aspire 5104wlmi) doesn´t really have any options in the bios...
I guess there might be something I could do with patching the dsdt, but I´m not sure how...

I can add that I have tested using the ioatafamily.kext without any plugins, and I still got the iokitwaitquiet error. While if I just remove the ioatafamily kext then I don´t get the iokitwaitquiet error and the boot time is about 40 seconds shorter, but then only my usb disk works.
I it seems that using the ioatafamily kext is unavoidable if I want my internal disk to boot... at least I haven´t found any other solutions so far.