Spinning beachball during OS X update

[MoodyM]

Trying to update my 2013 MBP and 2013 Mac Mini to OS X 10.11.1. The MBP went fine, then Mac Mini is stuck at the progress bar/Apple logo screen, around 3/4 of the way up the progress bar, with a spinning beachball.

Left it overnight, no change. Tried rebooting, got to the same point, did same thing again!

Help please!

 

[keysofanxiety]

Trying to update my 2013 MBP and 2013 Mac Mini to OS X 10.11.1. The MBP went fine, then Mac Mini is stuck at the progress bar/Apple logo screen, around 3/4 of the way up the progress bar, with a spinning beachball.

Left it overnight, no change. Tried rebooting, got to the same point, did same thing again!

Help please!

Restart and hold Cmd+R on startup to boot into the recovery partition. When you're in OS X Utilities, verify the volume and see if it's corrupted. If it's not corrupted, click 'Reinstall OS X' and set it to your partition. This will not delete any of your apps/data, and instead will just reinstall the core OS X files.

If it is corrupted, naturally repair the volume and try again from there.

Speak with you shortly.

 

[MoodyM]

Restart and hold Cmd+R on startup to boot into the recovery partition. When you're in OS X Utilities, verify the volume and see if it's corrupted. If it's not corrupted, click 'Reinstall OS X' and set it to your partition. This will not delete any of your apps/data, and instead will just reinstall the core OS X files.

If it is corrupted, naturally repair the volume and try again from there.

Speak with you shortly.

Thanks, was already booting into Recovery when I typed my message, currently running First Aid on the Macintosh HD partition.

As an aside, why does running First Aid on Macintosh HD take a while, but running it on the Apple SSD (on which the only partition is the aforementioned Macintosh HD) takes seconds?

 

[keysofanxiety]

Thanks, was already booting into Recovery when I typed my message, currently running First Aid on the Macintosh HD partition.

As an aside, why does running First Aid on Macintosh HD take a while, but running it on the Apple SSD (on which the only partition is the aforementioned Macintosh HD) takes seconds?

It's because the 'top' part of the two listed isn't really a volume, it's just the hard-drive itself, so it just checks minimal things (sorry I can't give you a more detailed explanation that that). But the bottom of the two is the physical formatted volume which would be 500GB or whatever size it is, so it needs to go through a lot more data.

I'm sure another poster knows a lot more and will correct me where I'm wrong ;-D

Hope the First Aid goes well matey, keep me posted.

 

[MoodyM]

It's because the 'top' part of the two listed isn't really a volume, it's just the hard-drive itself, so it just checks minimal things (sorry I can't give you a more detailed explanation that that). But the bottom of the two is the physical formatted volume which would be 500GB or whatever size it is, so it needs to go through a lot more data.

I'm sure another poster knows a lot more and will correct me where I'm wrong ;-D

Hope the First Aid goes well matey, keep me posted.

Complete with no errors

 

[keysofanxiety]

Complete with no errors

Okey dokey, if we try the 'Reinstall OS X' option now? Fingers crossed that'll work ...

Thanks for your patience Moody!

 

[MoodyM]

Okey dokey, if we try the 'Reinstall OS X' option now? Fingers crossed that'll work ...

Thanks for your patience Moody!

Trying it now, says it'll take 4 hours to download files!

 

[keysofanxiety]

Trying it now, says it'll take 4 hours to download files!

Oh boy. Yeah it can definitely test one's patience depending on the speed of your Internet.

Well, no better prompt to make yourself a hefty G&T and get a few smokes down.

 

[MoodyM]

Now it's stuck in an infinite loop of black screen with Apple logo and progress bar, progress bar fills right up (only takes a few minutes) then Mac reboots, and repeat...

 

[MoodyM]

Actually it didn't go into an infinite loop, one of the time it got to over 3/4 of the way up the progress bar, then stuck. Left it like that overnight, no change.

So today I booted into Recovery and chose to restore from a Time Machine backup. That seemed to go ok and when done took me back to the OS X logon screen. However when I clicked my name and typed my password and pressed return, I just got a spinning beachball, and it's been like that now for over 30 minutes

 

[MoodyM]

I've now restored it to a Time Machine backup from 2 days ago, and the exact same thing is happening

 

[MoodyM]

Actually I just remembered something that kept popping up before the problems started - it was a dialog box saying:

"Mac OS X needs to repair Library to run Applications"

and it was asking for my password, but every time I put it in, the box just kept popping up a minute later. It was then that I run the OS X update and the problems started

 

[MoodyM]

Have tried booting into Safe Mode, get the exact same spinning beachball problem when trying to log into my account there

 

[MoodyM]

Hmm, Guest User logs in just fine...

 

[MoodyM]

Right, this is weird - when I log in as Guest, I can see from the Fast User Switch menu bar icon that my actual account is logged in, it's just that when I try switch to it, I get a black screen with spinning beach ball

 

[MoodyM]

Getting even stranger now - I managed to log in as Guest and then create a new Admin account. This new Admin account logged in fine, and I used that to delete my problematic user account, then rebooted. I then logged in with this new Admin account again, and created another new admin account with my own name/Apple ID.

Low and behold, when I try to log in to this account, I get the exact same beachball problem as before! How can that be possible? I deleted the account and re-created it!

 

[dsemf]

Getting even stranger now - I managed to log in as Guest and then create a new Admin account. This new Admin account logged in fine, and I used that to delete my problematic user account, then rebooted. I then logged in with this new Admin account again, and created another new admin account with my own name/Apple ID.

Low and behold, when I try to log in to this account, I get the exact same beachball problem as before! How can that be possible? I deleted the account and re-created it!

Based on your actions, the problem appears to be located in the ~/Library folder, not /Library or /System/Library.

When you deleted your bad account, did you retain and reuse the home directory?

I would return to the temporary admin account, delete the bad user again, rename /Users/badname to save it and re-create the desired admin account with a fresh directory structure. If the new account works, then I would CAREFULLY copy stuff from the bad home directory to the new one. This is a variation on my clean install procedure where I manually restore data from a backup and have to redo all system preferences, license keys, etc. by hand.

DS