MBP restarts at older state

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MBP restarts at older state

Hello Community,

I recently had a HDD failure in my MBP 17" (2010), core i5 and RAM upgraded to 8Mb. Didn't get the Apple Care so I had to replace it myself with a WD Scorpio Black 750Gb.

After reinstalling the OS and the basic programs I needed, everything was fine or so it seemed. There are now a few things that are not working properly and they all seem connected.

1. I use iStats Menu from Bjango. Great app, not a problem for years. Changed the settings the way I wanted it. But now I want to change something and it won't let me. For example, I currently show the CPU as one item instead of four. Want to change it back to show the multiple CPU cores and even if I uncheck the checkbox it won't change.

2. Safari keeps restarting in its old states. Not the last state (visited page) but a page I visited a few days ago.

3. I installed Office for Mac and there is a little program, My Day, that comes with Entourage that sets itself as a launching App when the CPU is restarting. I remove it, restart the computer and it's still there.

4. When I do a restart, the checkbox is checked to reboot and the same state (windows and everything) and it always reopen the same state as of a few days ago (probably the same time as item 2)

I did basic things:

- Reset Permission

- Repair disk

- Ran diagnostic with Techtool pro (everything was fine)

- Reset the PRAM

Newly created files stay there, they don't get deleted. It seems to be only the configuration of the Mac I can't change. All of this seems to coincide with the installation with Office for Mac, though I highly doubt that's the problem. Probably no causality here.

If there are any questions I'll gladly provide more informations.

Thank you

Posted on Mar 26, 2012 5:25 AM

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Answer 1

Dahlex Author

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Mar 26, 2012 10:53 AM in response to Dahlex

Other problems that may help to narrow it down

- New bookmarks in Safari won't be there after restart

- Can't commit to git either with GitHub or command line. with command line I get "fatal: unable to write new_index file" which kind of leads me to think there is a problem with permissions. With GitHub I get a simple error pop up.

- Tried to restart holding D to run Apple Hardware Test, wouldn't work. It goes through a normal restart.

HDD is far from full and RAM is barely used by any process.

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Answer 2

Dahlex Author

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Mar 29, 2012 5:54 AM in response to Dahlex

Report of my encounter with an Apple Genius. Good news is, it's not a hardware problem but software. The installation of an app messed up the permissions too badly/agressivly/deeply. Something went wrong somewhere. Unfortunatly there was no way to tell which application caused that.

One command line I saw him tried was 'sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash', but didn't solved the problem. They have multiple tools at the Apple Store unavailable to us and none of them worked.

First thing that tipped him off was when rebooting in safe mode (holding shift key while the computer starts), there was no problem. Safe mode, if I understood him correctly, starts the OS with just the essentials to be running. There was no problem with the essentials, so it had to be one of the program I installed. Second thing he did to confirm is creating a test account to see if the problems were still there. They were not.

Two things were possible to solve it, nuked the HDD and start over, or create a new admin account, transfer everything over there and delete the first. I chose the second option. Now everything works fine.

If I had to guess, it's probably Git (dev tool for version control) that messed up something. I am now extra carefull before installing it. Soon I'll even install the OS on an external drive and test everything on it before intalling something.

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