Beachballing on login screen

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Beachballing on login screen

Hi, I just installed Lion and I have noticed something very frustrating doing login.

I am using a mid-2010 MBP. Lion is a clean install.

When I startup my computer, I can see the login screen fine, but I get a never ending spinning beach ball when I try to do _any_ of the following:

1. Click in the password field.

2. Move the cursor around the screen for a while.

3. Start typing on keyboard without moving the cursor.

The beachball would not stop, and prevents my cursor from moving after it starts spinning. I am forced to reboot with ctrl+command+power button.

The only way I could get around this is to have my computer auto-login, but I really don't want that since it's a portable...

I never had this problem with Snow Leopard. I have re-clean-installed Lion three times, and still I have this issue.

Please help! Thanks!

Ke

Posted on Jul 20, 2011 1:39 PM

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Answer 1

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Ke Sun Author

Level 1

40 points

Jul 20, 2011 4:22 PM in response to Ke Sun

Solved the issue...

After reading the system logs using Console app, I found out that when you have "allow users to reset password using apple id" enabled in user account, it seems like on startup my mac keeps on trying to verify the account is a safe account with apple servers or something, and that keeps it locking up and throwing a beach ball attack...

I simply deleted the associated apple id in the user account, and also unchecked the "allow users to reset... using apple id" option, and the problem seemed to go away.

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Answer 2

lamlam

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Jul 20, 2011 4:47 PM in response to Ke Sun

I have the same problem except "allow users to reset password using apple id" is NOT enabled. I do not have any associated apple ID in the user account either. Any ideas on what i can do? I'm also using a 2010 MBP with a seagate momentus xt (SD25 firmware, the latest).

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Answer 3

Ke Sun Author

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Jul 20, 2011 5:00 PM in response to Ke Sun

Sorry, this fix only worked for like an hour, and now I am having the exact same issues again on my mid-2010 MBP...

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Answer 4

Ke Sun Author

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Jul 20, 2011 5:01 PM in response to lamlam

I don't really have any other way of solving it right now, I am going to turn on automatic signin... The Apple bug report I submitted was closed too due to "not enough information"... I will try to dig into the console logs again to see if I can find anything unusual. :-(

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Answer 5

Jul 20, 2011 5:08 PM in response to Ke Sun

I had the same issue, 1st turned out to be problems with BLUETOOTH keyboard and mouse not being recognised. Then the issue with the "allow users to reset... using apple id" option.

Here I turned off wifi and modem so it could no contact APPLE servers - which are a bit busy at this moment in time!

And all was well.

SBB

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Answer 6

lamlam

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Jul 20, 2011 5:27 PM in response to Ke Sun

EDIT:: Nevermind, it stopped working after a couple of restarts. Turning off wifi doesnt' resolve the problem either 😟

After looking at app console, i discovered that i had this error at approximately the same time the beachballing occurs: kCGErrorFailure.

I followed this forum's advice(https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2427537?start=0&tstart=0 ) and deleted contents from both /library/caches and library/preferences/systemconfiguration folders. (I also made backup copies of the folder contents just in case something goes wrong.) This seems to have solve the issue after a restart. 😀

Note: I did NOT enable "allow users to reset password using apple id" and did not have any apple ID associated with the account. My bluetooth is disable and wifi is turned on.

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Answer 7

Ke Sun Author

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40 points

Jul 20, 2011 6:39 PM in response to lamlam

Tried your tip, but it's still not working for me... sigh... maybe I should submit a bug report again.

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Answer 8

Jul 20, 2011 7:51 PM in response to Ke Sun

I feel your pain!

After all the problems with 10.6.8 I had hoped that 10.7 would be bug free.

Have you tried restarting in safe mode?

Or I read somewhere, to log in as a root account and then create a new user account. That worked for them.

Sorry can't be more helpful, I am just hoping my system remans stable.

Simon

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Answer 9

Ke Sun Author

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40 points

Jul 20, 2011 8:01 PM in response to Simon Bedford

Hey Simon,

Yeah, I was really looking forwrd to 10.7 too. I ran the GM Seed and had this very same issue, hoping the release version would be different, but alas, here we are.

I _might_ have found something a bit useful: I noticed when beachball spins, the GPU fans run pretty fast, so I went into power management and turned off GPU switching. I have since done two reboots, each delayed input and clicked the **** out of the login screen, and I still was able to login fine. Please try that and see if it works for you.

Fingers crossed!

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