Spinning beachball on login with OS X El Capitan

Does the same thing happen if you put the machine to sleep from the Apple menu and try to wake it up?

Can you still reproduce the problem? If not, you don't need to do anything.

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

Step 1

For this step, the title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Enter "BOOT_TIME" (without the quotes.)

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Select the BOOT_TIME log message that corresponds to the last boot time when you had the problem. Now clear the search box to reveal all messages. Select the ones logged before the boot, during the time something abnormal was happening. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

For example, if the system was unresponsive or was failing to shut down for three minutes before you forced a restart, post the messages timestamped within three minutes before the boot time, not after. Please include the BOOT_TIME message at the end of the log extract—not at the beginning.

If there are long runs of repeated messages, please post only one example of each. Don’t post many repetitions of the same message.

When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Step 2

In the Console window, select

DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION ▹ System Diagnostic Reports

(not Diagnostic and Usage Messages) from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

There is a disclosure triangle to the left of the list item. If the triangle is pointing to the right, click it so that it points down. You'll see a list of reports. A crash report has a name that begins with the name of the crashed process and ends in ".crash". A panic report has a name that begins with "Kernel" and ends in ".panic". A shutdown stall report has a name that ends in ".shutdownstall". Select the most recent of each, if any. The contents of the report will appear on the right. Use copy and paste to post the entire contents—the text, not a screenshot. It's possible that none of these reports exists.

I know the report is long, maybe several hundred lines. Please post all of it anyway.

If you don't see any reports listed, but you know there was a crash or panic, you may have chosen Diagnostic and Usage Messages from the log list. Choose DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION instead.

In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)

Please don’t post other kinds of diagnostic report—they're very long and rarely helpful.

When you post the log extract or the crash report, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

My iMac suffers a very similar problem. I can log in fine after a power cycle, but logging in after a sleep/wake cycle is impossible. The login screen appears, but the spinning beachball shows up and login is prevented (keyboard input is ignored). I need to hold the power button in to forcefully power it down. When I power up, I can log in just fine.

After using the iMac for a while, before it sleeps, the beachball will periodically appear for no apparent reason, freezing the iMac and making it unusable for ~10 minutes...if I am patient enough to wait 10 minutes. Then the beachball goes away and behavior is normal for a while.

I am pretty good at troubleshooting but I don't even know were to begin.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be related to Time Machine, but that might be a red herring.

This iMac has been running flawlessly for years and has been running well under El Capitan for months. No new software installed recently.

Any suggested path for troubleshooting? Is this a known issue with a fix?

It is an old but high-end iMac running 10.11.4.

Specs:

Late 2009 27-inch iMac

2.8 GHz i7

12 GB RAM

Looks like in my case the issue is a failing HDD.

Deeper diagnostics are being run at an authorized service center, but I think that is the issue.

I'll post back here by May 15, 2016 IFF I am wrong.

Well, I'm posting anyway. I was right. The HDD was dying, and then it died horribly.

A new drive (SSD) is now installed and everything works great. Time Machine restored everything, almost like magic.

It is comforting to have first-hand proof that Time Machine really works after a catastrophic startup disk failure.

6/13/16 4:58:11.000 PM bootlog[0]: BOOT_TIME 1465858691 0

6/13/16 4:26:10.634 PM mDNSResponder[93]: 39: Could not write data to client PID[1736](backupd) because of error - aborting connection

No .crash, .panic, .shutdownstall reports

Thank you.

Same problem. Was using Yosemite, computer became slow, switched to another computer, replaced drive with SSD, installed fresh El Capitan, Migrated old drive, everything works but if I get email alerts while the computer is in screen saver, then when I go to dismiss the screen saver I beach ball with all the notifications visible. New SSD so let's not talk about bad HD's here. This is a bug.

My machine is doing the same thing after wake. iMac late 2015. I tried it from a manual sleep and it wakes ok, but when I return to it, after it sleeps on its own, it takes some time (Beach Ball). I did the console gander and found a "cannot connect to an NSApplication." I don't see a "boot_time" listing.

Hello to all,

I have the same problem, with the following details. The problem is on a MacBook Pro 2011, with El Capitan 10.11.6.

1) The problem appeared after I applied the last security update, that was a few days ago. Before that, everything worked perfectly well.

2) Upon starting the MacBook goes to the point where I enter my password. The password is accepted and the wheel starts spinning. I must force quit.

I've tried the following actions to no avail:

1) Resetting the NVRAM

2) A safe boot

3) Running Disk Utility in Recovery Mode

4) File system consistency check restarting while holding Command+S

Can someone help ? Thank you