It's Friday ... (2014-01-10)

[Simon]

Good morning world

Not a good start on the year so far. The few days of flu-like sickness was made worse yesterday when my other (newer) MacBook showed me a kernel panic warning saying I needed to restart. But on restart the process keeps hanging right before the sign in screen is shown.

Tried all the usual first step things. Started up in single-user mode and ran the disk check routines. No problems. Started from CD drive and ran Hardware Test. No problems. Reset SMC and zapped PRAM. Still can't get the sign in screen to show itself. Little feedback wheel spins and screen changes like it's going to show the login box, but then the little wheel comes back and spins for awhile, then back to almost loading the login screen, then back to the little spinning wheel.

We don't have an Apple store down here (nearest one is about 100 miles), so I need to decide whether this is a "have to send it in to be fixed" problem, or whether it's something I can fix myself without needing to send it away.

So working on this problem is my plan for today.

Wishing everyone a better day than I'll be enjoying.

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by Simon

But on restart the process keeps hanging right before the sign in screen is shown.

Couple of things to try.

Hold down Command V on reboot to see what is actually going on when booting.

Also try holding down the Shift Key when booting to boot into safe mode.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Cleo

Couple of things to try.

Hold down Command V on reboot to see what is actually going on when booting.

Also try holding down the Shift Key when booting to boot into safe mode.

Thanks, Cleo. I'd already tried everything except booting into safe mode...and then doing the required emptying of the trash. Once I'd done that (plus created a new empty folder, thrown it in the trash, and emptied the trash again), I was able to restart normally and login with no trouble.

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by Simon

Thanks, Cleo. I'd already tried everything except booting into safe mode...and then doing the required emptying of the trash. Once I'd done that (plus created a new empty folder, thrown it in the trash, and emptied the trash again), I was able to restart normally and login with no trouble.

Glad you got it fixed.

Always a good idea to have a second admin account on the computer. Personally I always enable a root account. Then if I'm having issues I can boot into root and do things like delete all my caches or just about anything since a root account has compete access to do anything to any account.

Also show all hidden files is sometimes helpful.
10.9

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

10.8 and below

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE