Hackintosh Slow Boot to BIOS Post Fix
I love my Hackintosh. It handles my Mac and Windows computing needs with aplomb. But there was an issue with it that I couldn’t figure out…until now.
And that issue involved an excruciatingly slow boot to the BIOS POST (Power-on Self-Test). We’re talking a good 30 to 40 seconds before the BIOS POST screen would appear. Surprisingly, the problem had little to do with the Hackintosh (CustoMac) and more to do with the Snowball BLU USB microphone that was plugged into my machine. Unplugging the USB microphone from the port on the motherboard did the trick. Now my boot to the BIOS POST is under 3 seconds, and I’m staring at my Mac login screen in about 5 seconds. To confirm my initial results, I rebooted the Hackintosh a few times with and without the Snowball mic plugged in.
While the workaround was to unplug the Snowball mic from the computer, I’m interested to know what the underlying cause of the problem might be. Maybe someone reading this can offer a better solution.
-Krishna
TonyJ
May 23, 2016 at 8:08 amNot wanting to be ridiculously obvious here, but have you checked the BIOS boot options? I’ve had machines try to boot from external USB data drives to USB keyboards (yeah, that didn’t work!) in the past. Make sure your boot priorities are correct and also USB devices are disabled from the boot order. You might need to have the mic plugged in during the setup to check that, though.
Krishna
May 23, 2016 at 1:58 pmThanks, TonyJ. Yes, I’ve checked the BIOS boot options (unless I have overlooked something). I have Legacy USB devices disabled in the BIOS. The boot order goes to my SSD first. I’ll continue testing…
TonyJ
May 27, 2016 at 7:14 amHmm, a quick look suggests that it uses a standard “printer-type” USB cable. Have you tried using another cable in case there’s an issue with that? (I’m thinking, if it’s an older cable, then there might be some fatigue in it causing some wire cross-talk or similar that could be confusing the motherboard).
Krishna
May 27, 2016 at 4:09 pmI can try another cable – but the base of the Blue microphone has the thicker USB “printer-type” cable – so I can’t really do anything about it (unless I buy another mic). The mic has seen very little use, so the cable should be okay. I’ll give another cable a try to see if that makes any difference, but my gut tells me it’s going to do the same thing.
TonyJ
May 27, 2016 at 7:15 amHmm, a quick look suggests that it uses a standard “printer-type” USB cable. Have you tried using another cable in case there’s an issue with that? (I’m thinking, if it’s an older cable, then there might be some fatigue in it causing some wire cross-talk or similar that could be confusing the motherboard).
DAVe3283
May 23, 2016 at 4:29 pmThe BIOS might be trying to initialize all USB devices for handoff to a legacy OS. Since both MacOS X and Windows (Vista and newer) are UEFI compliant, you should be able to disable USB initialization. It might be called USB initialization, USB handoff, legacy USB, or something similar.
Just be sure to remember what the setting was before, because there is a slim chance one of your OSes won’t boot after it is changed, or your boot manager might not see the keyboard, or something weird.
Krishna
May 23, 2016 at 4:47 pmThanks, Dave. I will scout around my computer’s BIOS setup and see if one of those parameters is present. The only one I have actively seen and disabled is Legacy USB devices but that didn’t do anything in terms of resolving the long delay before boot POST.
DAVe3283
May 23, 2016 at 6:36 pmIf you can’t find an option, or they don’t do anything, you can try plugging the microphone into a different port, or even a hub. Sometimes different USB ports use different controllers, and it is possible only one of the controllers has the problem. For example, my computer will only recognize my keyboard correctly in the top two ports. In theory, USB is USB, but in practice, weird things happen…