Seems to be happening several times a day now.
The Finder crashes and relaunches itself. The Finder icon is moved to the end of the Cmd-Tab thing. All the windows come back except for the Searches.
EtreCheck report is attached. TIA!
iMac 24″, macOS 12.6
Oh, it appears to be EtreCheck that misled you. I think "First occurrence" must mean since the last boot. But it says 60 days. Sorry about that! I should have been more clear or detailed.
I am attaching an EtreCheck report from 2024-05-12. It has a Finder crash with an error message (which I'll google sooner or later today).
Yes, it says the last 60 days, but that's not right! I've had plenty of Finder crashes over that period. Attaching the full EtreCheck report. You can see many other things have crashed.
Start with this of M1 or M2 Mac...
On your Mac, choose Apple menu > Shut Down.
Wait for your Mac to shut down completely. A Mac is completely shut down when the screen is black and any lights (including in the Touch Bar) are off.
Press and hold the power button on your Mac until “Loading startup options” appears.
Select a volume.
Press and hold the Shift key, then click Continue in Safe Mode.
The computer restarts automatically. When the login window appears, you should see “Safe Boot” in the menu bar.
Restart normally.
Manually Rebuilding Spotlight via Terminal
If the aforementioned Spotlight control panel approach doesn’t spur a reindexation of the drive, you may need to initiate it manually through the command line. Open Terminal and use the following command string to do so:
sudo mdutil -E /
This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:
sudo mdutil -i on /
Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.
If still need be…
Open Terminal and run each of these one at a time
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network
killall Dock
sudo mdutil -E /
sudo mdutil -i on /
Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.
If still need be reinstall the OS.
It this what you're recommending? Sounds like it!
Do a Safe boot.
See if that fixes the problem
It won't, because this has been happening for weeks, if not months, but I'll try it.
If it doesn't fix the problem, re-index Spotlight.
If that doesn't fix the problem, re-install the OS.
Re-install the OS? I tried that once. Said it couldn't downgrade. (It wanted to reinstall the .0 version.) So I aborted. Seems to me that I'd initialize the disk (erase) and restore from a Time Machine backup? Seems like a lot of work and a bit risky! Maybe it's time to upgrade from Monterey to Sonoma. Or just live with Finder crashing several times a day. It's fine if I don't have a search window open. And saving a search is quite awkward, as is saving things in other Apple apps. Sometimes "think different" is "think worse." But this one is extra awkward. What's wrong with Save, Save As, and Close?
Did a safe boot yesterday at 20:33 EDT. So far, no Finder crashes.
I see other crashes from before this boot:
PerfPowerServices
Arctic (working with vendor)
corespotlightd
logioptionsplus_agent (logioptionsplus_agent.app)
I think any boot causes Spotlight to be re-indexed. My Time Machine hard drive goes "buzzing" after a boot and keeps "buzzing."
Looking at the report 😎
The Internal Drive is bordering on the 20% Free Space remaining
If we look at some of the Other External Drives, some of them are also bordering on Less Than 20% Free Space
The less Free Space the more the machine will struggle to find Empty Space to save whatever changes are being made.
Thusly and maybe the Spotlight issue rears its' ugly head ?
The internal drive should be fine with 20% free space. I once worked on a VAXcluster at a job I had in the mid 90s. We ran Diskeeper. The manual said that the drive should have at least 20% free to avoid serious fragmentation. Drives were a lot smaller back then! I would think 20 years later on, this shouldn't be a problem for "the most advanced operating system in the world," as Apple claims. In fact, I found out through experience that the macOS will fill up the startup drive with those Time Machine "snapshots" right to the top. It's more than happy to do that. And when that happened, nothing unusual happened.
Yes, one of my external drives is pretty full. But it's also pretty static. Very little changes there.
The problem is mainly with Finder. As for Spotlight, are you talking about it restarting every boot? It's not supposed to do that?
Now, if Finder and Spotlight are so sensitive to these things, well, "the most advanced operating system in the world," according to Apple, ought to do better.
I didn't pay the big bucks for the SSD only to let 20% of it go empty.
Thanks for chiming in.
Well, according to EtreCheck, the Finder finally crashed this morning. Fortunately, it relaunches itself when that happens. But the problem is that Search windows don't come back.
I'll try re-indexing Spotlight when I go to bed for the night.
As for re-installing the OS, seems, given the work it would take (wiping the drive, recovering via Time Machine, which did not go smoothly the last time I had to do it!), I might just upgrade to Sonoma and hope for the best.
Thanks.
BDAqua wrote:
Reinstalling should not touch your user Data at all.
That's not the problem. Many moons ago, I tried to reinstall the OS once, and it said it couldn't downgrade. IIRC, I had 12.6.x at the time, and it would only be willing or able to install 12.0. It said it couldn't downgrade, so I was stuck. So if I can't use the standard re-install method, I have to wipe the disk and restore the entire kit-and-caboodle from a Time Machine backup. I might as well consider an upgrade to Sonoma, given all this.
True, to install an earlier version you need to have the Installer on a Bootable USB stick or drive. If you had 12.3 then you can only install 12.6 or greater, but using CMD+R Apple will only supply the latest highest version of 12, which ios 12.7.4 currently.
Well, safe boot didn't fix it.
Recently, I deleted two GoToMeeting "User Launch Agents." Thought I'd wait it out, just to be sure if that would fix it. As expected, it didn't. Next I'll try the Spotlight re-index, which seems to happen every time I boot anyway. But I'll wait till bedtime to do it manually.
No, sir. The Mac had Monterey when I bought it, and I have done all the updates. Now up to 12.7.4. Looks like it came with macOS 12.2.1, which I immediately updated to 12.6. Unfortunately, I don't recall when exactly this Finder-crashing problem started and what might have happened at the time. Based on a recent EtreCheck it last crashed May 8 at 10:03:52 ET. So that's more than 3 days of uptime without a Finder crash!
Oh, additionally, I didn't care initially, as I didn't have any search windows running. I only noticed that the Finder icon was the last one in the Cmd-Tab bar. When I started using Search windows, I noticed they would occasionally disappear. Then I investigated and found that Finder crashed and relaunched itself, bringing back all open windows except any Search windows.
BDAqua wrote:
2024-05-03 14:18:45 Finder Crash (8 times)
First occurrence: 2024-05-02 19:32:30
Most likely suspect...
Software Installs (past 60 days):
2024-05-02 Arctic (24.1.1)
It's been happening for months. I just decided to bring it up now. So it's not Arctic. My apologies! I might have brought it up here before. Not sure. Thanks for looking! Oh, it happens every few days. At one point it happened, I think, 3 times in one day. Back then, the average seemed to be about 1 crash a day. Maybe it's time to upgrade to Sonoma. But I'm not fond of upgrades.
Good idea. Fortunately, I'm not in the middle of a large Final Cut project. But upgrades usually mean things I like either break or go bye-bye. And the gains from Sonoma don't appear all that great for my purposes, except that I could run the current version of Final Cut on it!
Wait a minute. I'm doing a safe boot to re-index Spotlight? And a safe boot initiates a re-indexing of Spotlight?
No, a Safe Boot doesn't initiates a re-indexing of Spotlight, the purpose of a Safe Boot is to clear uppossibles causes of the Spotlight DB being corrupted.
Monterey Finder keeps crashing. All windows come back except search windows.
