This is a thread of doom.
Everything started with Chrome not loading anything. I tried Safari and it worked, but was showing certificate issues all the time.
I rebooted the computer and it became extremely slow. Apps were not launching, Safari kept showing certificate issues.
I somehow managed to open Activity Monitor and saw a bunch of processes taking 100% of CPU. I stopped them but the system was still laggy.
Further rebooting was showing just re-opened windows, one at a time, no dock, no status bar. Cmd+option+esc worked, I could kill processes, but could not launch anything, hence no finder access.
At this point I saw that somehow CleanMyMac toolbar loaded, stating there is ZERO kb space available. I tried rebooting again and that's when it stopped booting. Just constantly stuck on grey logo and spinner. Resetting PRAM did not help. It did not boot in safe mode too.
I made a mavericks bootable thumb drive. It did not install on top of the old system (mountain lion), showing error that it cannot re-partition the drive. I googled every single solution, and thought that the issue is that there is some runway log, that kept growing and took all the space (50GB was free couple days ago).
So I've decided to use terminal when booted from a thumb drive to delete some files with rm command. I could not do that too, since there were issues with ACL. I did not have rights to delete files, I could not assign them to me either. CHOWN, CHMOD, nothing helped, showing error INVALID ARGUMENT.
I struggled with this for around 8 hours, looked up every topic and tried every solution, being sure that I need to delete some files and it will start working. Then I've decided to try working not from the thumb drive's terminal, but to launch recovery mode (cmd+R) and use Lion's terminal. It did not help too, but during on of the reboots I failed to press option AND IT LOADED.
Yes, it loaded, I saw the wallpaper and was super happy about it. But, finder was showing everything empty, and those processes were back, taking 100% CPU. They were quicklookd and iCloud Photos. I managed to open preference pane, but nothing there worked. I was getting errors like "failed to load iCloud preference pane".
I've checked the free space on the hard drive, and 50 GB of free space were there.
Nothing worked so there was nothing I could do except restart again, and it was the last time it actually started the OS.
And now comes the best part.
All this time (from around midnight till now – 11AM) I was trying to save data. But at this point after 11 hours of failures I decided to just erase the drive and do a clean install. I went to erase it from recovery mode's Disk Utility, and it failed formatting it. "System formatter failed" Error, no matter what I do and what kind of partitioning map I choose. It does not format in Mac OS journaled, I cannot re-partiotion, nothing. It formats in MS-DOS super quick though.
So I spent 11 hours, did not sleep and decided to do a last thing I could – quickly ran to my office, brought home an external adapter, gout out the drive from the laptop and connected it to my other laptop as a USB external drive.
I am able to format it any way I want, any partitions, any names, anything. But as soon as I put it back into the laptop and try installing system on it I get another error – failed partitioning the "File system formatter failed. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again".
After this I am officially done trying to fix it alone and I need your help. ANY idea would do.
It's a 2010 MBP 13 inch, the drive is Samsung Evo 300GB SSD.
Thanks guys.
Everything started with Chrome not loading anything. I tried Safari and it worked, but was showing certificate issues all the time.
I rebooted the computer and it became extremely slow. Apps were not launching, Safari kept showing certificate issues.
I somehow managed to open Activity Monitor and saw a bunch of processes taking 100% of CPU. I stopped them but the system was still laggy.
Further rebooting was showing just re-opened windows, one at a time, no dock, no status bar. Cmd+option+esc worked, I could kill processes, but could not launch anything, hence no finder access.
At this point I saw that somehow CleanMyMac toolbar loaded, stating there is ZERO kb space available. I tried rebooting again and that's when it stopped booting. Just constantly stuck on grey logo and spinner. Resetting PRAM did not help. It did not boot in safe mode too.
I made a mavericks bootable thumb drive. It did not install on top of the old system (mountain lion), showing error that it cannot re-partition the drive. I googled every single solution, and thought that the issue is that there is some runway log, that kept growing and took all the space (50GB was free couple days ago).
So I've decided to use terminal when booted from a thumb drive to delete some files with rm command. I could not do that too, since there were issues with ACL. I did not have rights to delete files, I could not assign them to me either. CHOWN, CHMOD, nothing helped, showing error INVALID ARGUMENT.
I struggled with this for around 8 hours, looked up every topic and tried every solution, being sure that I need to delete some files and it will start working. Then I've decided to try working not from the thumb drive's terminal, but to launch recovery mode (cmd+R) and use Lion's terminal. It did not help too, but during on of the reboots I failed to press option AND IT LOADED.
Yes, it loaded, I saw the wallpaper and was super happy about it. But, finder was showing everything empty, and those processes were back, taking 100% CPU. They were quicklookd and iCloud Photos. I managed to open preference pane, but nothing there worked. I was getting errors like "failed to load iCloud preference pane".
I've checked the free space on the hard drive, and 50 GB of free space were there.
Nothing worked so there was nothing I could do except restart again, and it was the last time it actually started the OS.
And now comes the best part.
All this time (from around midnight till now – 11AM) I was trying to save data. But at this point after 11 hours of failures I decided to just erase the drive and do a clean install. I went to erase it from recovery mode's Disk Utility, and it failed formatting it. "System formatter failed" Error, no matter what I do and what kind of partitioning map I choose. It does not format in Mac OS journaled, I cannot re-partiotion, nothing. It formats in MS-DOS super quick though.
So I spent 11 hours, did not sleep and decided to do a last thing I could – quickly ran to my office, brought home an external adapter, gout out the drive from the laptop and connected it to my other laptop as a USB external drive.
I am able to format it any way I want, any partitions, any names, anything. But as soon as I put it back into the laptop and try installing system on it I get another error – failed partitioning the "File system formatter failed. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again".
After this I am officially done trying to fix it alone and I need your help. ANY idea would do.
It's a 2010 MBP 13 inch, the drive is Samsung Evo 300GB SSD.
Thanks guys.
