Best Method for repairing a corrupted profile or transferring to a new one?

[Valdaquendë]

About 48 hours ago, my Mac Pro (cMP 5,1 / 3.46GHz 12-core / 32GB RAM / MacOS 10.12.6 / 2TB boot SSD and 3 4TB HDDs) began acting oddly. I found that it would not populate a Finder window opening on a mounted drive. Moreover, if I clicked on any Finder window or menu item, I got the Spinning Beachball of Eternal Contemplation. I reset PRAM (5-chime) and booted into Safe Mode, then rebooted. No change when booting normally but I did find that in Safe Mode the system functioned normally (normal for Safe Mode, anyhow).

When I checked with TTP12, it initially suggested that there were partition mapping problems on all four drives in the system. Appalled, I immediately ran First Aid on all the drives and got "drive appears to be OK - File system exit code = 0" on all of them. Then I ran TTP12 (full suite), which found a number of file attribute issues but all were for user documents. I skipped the surface scans on the 3 4TB HDDs (I'd still be waiting on them if I hadn't) but ran full diagnostics on the SSD; no problem found.

To try to ascertain the scope of the problem, I tried creating another user profile and logged into it; the system seems to function normally. I used CCC to clone the SSD to another, fresh SSD; same behaviour. I also reinstalled MacOS 10.12.6 from the Recovery Partition but the behavior remains; Finder basically hangs upon profile login (and a mouse click or two). But only, it seems, in my profile.

As I see it, I have a couple of choices: I can either rebuild from scratch using another SSD, installing system, apps, etc., and then copy the contents of my old user folder to the new SSD OR I can try copying the contents of the old user folder into the new one. I'd rather not rebuild everything from scratch as I have several venerable utilities and programs that are installed but are no longer available for purchase or license transfer, so I'm leaning toward profile migration. But, of course, I don't want to transfer whatever is screwing up my current profile to the new one.

There's a lot I don't know. Any suggestions you may have for either approaching this problem another way or for optimizing the migration of the user folder contents to another profile would be carefully considered and very greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance for any insights or advice.

 

[BrianBaughn]

My vote is for a new User Account on the existing SSD. You seem to have pinpointed the issue.

Copying normal folders and documents over from your user folder is easy. Where it can get tricky is with things like Mail folders that are under "On My Mac", if there are any. Other stuff that may lie in your user Library folder may have to just be rebuilt from scratch which could be either easy or time consuming.

Be sure to keep the old user account for a while.

 

[Valdaquendë]

Thanks, BrianBaughn. I tried to use Time Machine, in Safe Mode, to rewind the system but it's not working properly; probably because the Finder is too badly corrupted. The TM window fails to populate. In the 36 years I've been using Macs, this is the first time I've had to consider a recovery, so it's back to school ...

I found this article which explains how to restore a Mac to an earlier date from Recovery Mode; I'm going to try that first; since this problem has only occurred in the last 72 hours or so and I haven't been able to use the system (and thus create or edit files) since then, this may be just what I need. I'll post back either way in case anyone else in this spot can benefit from this experience.

As soon as I realized I had a problem, I cloned the SSD to another one and am using that to experiment with, knowing that if things get too screwed up, I can simply clone from my original volume and experiment further.

I found this article, which points to the idea that this problem may be due to incorrect or corrupted Home folder permissions; if TM restore doesn't work, I plan to perform some of the solutions mentioned in it. I also noted, in more than one article, that upgrading MacOS to the next version may solve such problems. Time presses, however; I make my living, as well as my pleasure, from this system, so I'll have to temper my insatiable curiosity with expediency.

Again, thanks, BrianBaughn. I appreciate any ideas, perspectives or avenues that may get me back to an even keel!

 

[Valdaquendë]

The Strangest "Solution" Of All

I now understand what happened and it is one of the weirdest phenomena I've encountered in almost 35 years of computing.

Using the cloned SSD, I tried restoring the system to a date before this behaviour began; this seemed to help but as time went by I began noting some of the same anomalies, Before performing the recovery, I could open the Applications, Utilities and other windows but they would not populate. After the recovery, these windows worked normally but still some Finder windows, when opened, would not populate or would only partially populate. I also found, after a time, that applications like TextEdit failed to launch. I started looking at the affected directories from other systems on the network to further examine the scope of the problem and verify that it was the operating system and not some problem with the directories or their volumes. Windows that would not populate on my cMP displayed perfectly when accessed from other systems. Here's where it gets weird ...

I have, on my network, another Mac Pro (cMP 1,1) that I use as a media server; it has a 2TB boot drive and three 4TB storage drives. I had set these volumes to automatically mount on my system (in the "Users & Groups" control panel's "Login Items") so that they would be available upon login. When this problem began, I removed them all from "Login Items" and rebooted to ensure that they were not a factor. I had also rebooted several times while working on this problem and verified that they no longer mounted. I had no reason to think that there was any remaining connection to the media server (other than than its mere presence on the network).

When I tried accessing the media server from the affected machine, I got an unpopulated window. When I went to that system, I got the same result from one of its volumes. Running Disk Utility, I found that that drive was in trouble and could not be repaired. I immediately shut the system down .... and BINGO!!

EVERYTHING on my system began working properly! From across the room, I watched the documents I had tried to open suddenly open and found that they (and everything, apparently) behaved normally. The entire system works normally, as far as I can tell.

As mentioned above, I had cloned an SSD to experiment with and had been booting from that; now I went back and booted from the original boot volume and found that it, too, works perfectly normally (again, as far as I can tell); I'm writing this post from that system. I do not understand why the malfunctioning of a remote drive not mounted on the affected system would ... well ... affect it. But apparently it did. If anyone can point me in the direction of better understanding this phenomenon, I would greatly appreciate it. In the meantime, I believe this problem to be resolved.

There are a couple of takeaways I got from this experience:
• I could probably have shortened the diagnostic path considerably if I had thought to disconnect the affected system from the network. I have always believed in eliminating as many factors as possible from the equation in order to simplify a problem; wish I had considered this sooner. The problem looked like an OS problem confined to a single system; it wasn't. Lesson learned.

• It took over 7 hours to clone the boot volume and over 9 hours to perform the Time Machine recovery. Those hours were a sore trial as I had a lot of work to do and was hamstrung by the lack of this system. This, as it turned out, was not an operating system problem but it raised the possibility of such an occurrence in the future. I got a 2TB SSD, connected it to the back of the office system with a SATA -> USB adapter and set CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) to clone the boot volume to this SSD daily so that, should something ever really affect the boot volume, I can simply swap SSDs and move on, with a minimal loss of work.

I hope this information proves useful. May the Stars Shine Upon Your Path.