Re: Slow volume mounting in GS/OS

[dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <4a59op$m98@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com>,
Phil Abel <TTSH35A@prodigy.com> wrote:
> When booting (or restarting) GS/OS, and all my online volumes are mounted,
>  I have one in particular that takes a real long time. It's about a 30MB 
> partition on a 40MB vulcan gold drive. I have a couple SCSI drives that 
> it mounts quickly, as does the other partition on the vulcan gold.

Are you talking about the icons appearing in Finder?  This isn't
really "mounting" - the partitions are all "mounted" during boot,
which should take practically no time at all (and you can't see which
one is being mounted anyway).

For each partition/volume, Finder reads the "Desktop" and "Finder.Root"
files (if present) as well as processing all of the icon files in the
Icons directory.  If any windows were open (this information is kept
in Finder.Root), they will be opened again.

This can take a long time, particularly if you have a large Desktop
file or a lot of icon files.


There is a small chance that there might be a physical defect on the
drive that is causing delays.  Try doing a "Verify" on the appropriate
partition in Finder, and listen to the drive.  Assuming the mechanism
is loud enough, you should be able to hear the head moving between
cylinders at a regular rate.  If it pauses for a long time, there
could be a physical defect on the drive (even if no block error is
reported by Finder - the drive just had to make a lot of retries to
read the data successfully).


If it is just the icon files and/or desktop file, your only options are:

- Delete the "Desktop" file, in case it has accumulated a lot of rubbish
  (e.g. Spectrum 1.0's bundle got added to the Desktop file every time you
  launched it).  This will cause Finder to forget about any applications
  that were on the partition.

- Get rid of any icon files that aren't really necessary.  Check that
  none of the icon files are damaged (use an icon editor to view all of
  the icons and check that the information is valid).

- Get an accelerator (if you don't already have one), or modify it to
  run faster.

- Stop using Finder as your program selector.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand