crashed: too many corpses being created

After installing a Yosemite update on my laptop, when it boots, it seems to all be fine until about the loading bar is maybe 2/3 done, then slows to a crawl and takes another 20 minutes or so to reach full - where it stays. I have no cursor or anything else during this time, but my caps lock button light will go on an off when I press it.

I've tried:
-Resetting PRAM/NVRAM
-Booting into recovery mode and repairing the drive/partition. This seemed to be done successfully.
-Booting hardware diagnostics and doing a check. It says everything is fine.
-Safe boot. Takes the same length of time and hangs at the same place, so honestly not sure if I'm even doing it right.
-Verbose mode says every single process has crashed, with 'too many corpses being created.'. (picture - note that it's not actually blurry, just scrolling pretty fast so a photo wasn't the best)

It's a Mid-2011 15" Macbook pro, 2.2GHz with a 750GB hard drive and 16GB of RAM. I'm still doing a few other checks (currently re-installing 10.10 using a thumb drive to see if that fixes it), but has anyone got any ideas or had a similar problem?

MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jun 27, 2015 2:24 PM

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Posted on Oct 1, 2017 4:49 AM

The following didn't work for me, but creating/fixing the file rc.server has worked for many others with a similar problem. To do this, boot up your Mac in Single User mode (hold Cmd+S immediately as you hear the Apple chime).


Once the initial verbose script has finished loading, enter the following two lines:

mount -uw /

/usr/bin/nano /etc/rc.server

The first line allows your Mac's system files to be written to. The second line opens/creates rc.server as a file, using the nano process. Once the file opens, delete any script that already exists (don't worry if it's empty) and then enter the following two lines:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/sbin/BootCacheControl jettison

Once finished, save your changes with Ctrl+O and then exit nano with Ctrl+X. Your Mac may then automatically reboot, but if it returns you to Single User mode, enter the following line:

reboot


Credit to Chris Hotte (a.k.a NightFlight) for originally discovering this fix


Hope this works for you!


Note: if you're using a UK-type keyboard like myself, you might have a hard time creating the # hash symbol required for the rc.server script. UK input requires Alt+3 to create #, but Alt seems to have no effect within Single User mode. To get around this, I used Recovery Mode (boot up and hold Cmd+R) and changed my input to a US keyboard, then rebooted. US input uses Shift+3 to get #, which works fine in Single User mode

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crashed: too many corpses being created

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