Finder beach ball problems!

[Dorothy Gale]

Aha! so it is not Boot Camp causing trouble. Well, thanks for that. One off the list!

 

[peewit106]

I can confirm that I have EXACTLY the same problem on my MacBook Pro 13" Late 2011. It drives me nuts. Every time I restart or relaunch the Finder I get the spinning pizza for about 5-6 seconds if I CTRL click on the Desktop or a file. Once that has happened then everything is fine until another Finder relaunch or Restart produces the same behaviour. This only happens in El Capitan. I rolled back to Mavericks - not a problem. I think the issue is with the DVD drive or the kext that controls it, or the storage of a preference file relating to Launch Services. I have tried EVERY fix for this. I can only hope that a fix is forthcoming. I even joined the OSX Beta program to submit bugs to Apple, it is still there in 10.11.4 beta.

Edit: This happens with a vanilla install. In the Console I get
kernel[0]: SerialATAPI device reconfiguration did not complete successfully. (failedCommandInfo = 0x1) after the beachball.
This seems to 'solve' it: https://discussions.apple.com/message/29874272#29874272

 

[peewit106]

Well, after trying to solve this problem (putting a blank CD/DVD in the drive 'fixed' it), I decided to try and replace the IOCDStorageFamily and IODVDStorageFamily kexts with the ones from Yosemite (after disabling SIP). I copied the old kexts to the Desktop first. I restarted and found that Activity Monitor showed that the System was having difficulty rebuilding the Kext cache. I reverted to the original kexts and rebuilt the System Kext Cache with Onyx.
When I restarted I found that the spinning beach ball did not appear. However on looking in the Console I saw this error:
"com.apple.kextcache[473]: IOCDStorageFamily.kext has incorrect permissions; omitting"
with the same error for the IODVDStorageFamily.kext.
However, the beachball has not appeared. It appears that the kernel has not loaded the two kexts, thus (in a way) confirming that the problem lies with either one, other or both of those kexts.

 

[Dorothy Gale]

@peewit106, thanks for your insight. Has anyone tried just to disable the SuperDrive from the Terminal.app? Upon research I found that you should run these commands:

sudo kextunload IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOSCSIMultimediaCommandsDevice.kext
sudo kextunload IOBDStorageFamily.kext
sudo kextunload IODVDStorageFamily.kext
sudo kextunload IOCDStorageFamily.kext

Not sure about the one related to SCSI, though. It might be a dependence but can't see it carrying out duties on modern Macs.

- - -

Also, how do you actually remove IODVDStorageFamily.kext and IOCDStorageFamily.kext from /System/Library/Extensions?

Once I try to delete those with…
sudo rm -R (drag&drop)

I get this feedback from the Terminal:
override rwxr-xr-x root/wheel restricted for /System/Library/Extensions/IOBDStorageFamily.kext/Contents/_CodeSignature?


- - -

I restarted and found that Activity Monitor showed that the System was having difficulty rebuilding the Kext cache.

Have you tried to delete /System/Library/Extensions/Extensions.kextcache before rebooting the Mac?

 

[Dorothy Gale]

Did anyone try to reset the PRAM and the SMC (System Management Controller)?

It seems to have fixed it for me. Don't ask me how or why, though.