iMac Update to El Capitan. Sleep is fine, but Restart freezes and have to re-install

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iMac Update to El Capitan. Sleep is fine, but Restart freezes and have to re-install

Hey all...

System Details: iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014)

Just did the update to El Capitan and ever since, Initial boot is fine and if I let it sleep it is fine the next time it wakes.

if I do a restart it will freeze at the Apple logo with a blank progress bar. Then have to hold power to shut down and try again. No success and this is where the problem starts.

Reset PRAM- Nothing

Boot to recovery - Checked drives and system etc. All good. But still no restart.

Did an internet restore... Nothing but an error picture after about half an hour but no description as to the error.

Recovery again and then enable internet and re-install El Capitan (3 times). Same problem.

Scared to do a shut down now.

Can someone help me please???

Cheers....

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 4, 2015 9:29 PM

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Answer 1

rkaufmann87

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140,274 points

Oct 4, 2015 10:07 PM in response to Smkosey

Reset the PRAM with NO peripherals attached. Then retest, if it works okay that indicates you have a peripheral problem.

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Answer 2

Smkosey Author

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Oct 4, 2015 10:11 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Disconnected all peripherals before starting anything. Just the keyboard, mouse and trackpad. all via bluetooth for initial startup.

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Answer 3

rkaufmann87

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140,274 points

Oct 5, 2015 5:43 AM in response to Smkosey

Smkosey wrote:

Disconnected all peripherals before starting anything. Just the keyboard, mouse and trackpad. all via bluetooth for initial startup.

And what happened??????

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Answer 4

Smkosey Author

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Oct 5, 2015 4:31 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Everything had been disconnected before I attempted any type of recovery action at the start.

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Answer 5

Smkosey Author

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Oct 9, 2015 7:53 PM in response to Smkosey

Ok. So after 4 days of apple phone support and stumping even their senior hard drive specialist, I was able to finally get an internet recovery to start and then in terminal, deleted the logical group that was holding my fusion drive together.

Back out into disk utility and then it rebuilt my fusion drive and voila Macintosh Hd was now showing and able to be recovered to. Hooray.

Just thought I would post this on case someone has a similar problem.

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Answer 6

BMcRaeC

Level 1

24 points

Oct 20, 2015 11:41 AM in response to Smkosey

Going through that very same issue with a brand new 27" iMac Retina 5K, 3TB Fusion drive and 32GB RAM. Ordered and delivered ~3 weeks ago, to replace 2011 27" for a client. Came out of the box with Yosemite 10.10.3, upgraded OS and apps, then installed El Capitan. Got all the client's accounts, apps and data onto the new machine via Migration Assistant. Everything was working great.

Client calls up on Sunday to say that the same symptoms (Apple with no progress progress bar) has been on for 3 days!

So far I have done Recovery Partition Disk Utility, resetting the PRAM, and safe boot, then called Apple.

First guy got senior support on it, and I sent them both this thread. The Terminal commands we ran through (renaming the terminalwindow preferences to force the OS to recreate a login window) do not seem to apply to El Capitan. /Library/Preferences does not HAVE a com.apple.loginwindow.plist file!

Currently trying to do an El Capitan network reinstall. I hope I don't have to go the same route of rebuilding the Fusion drive, because the client doesn't have a backup for this new machine yet…

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