Q: 10.11.1 update erased all apps

This is just to let the Community know that this bug is still out there and causing trouble. I just encountered it after upgrading to El Capitan 10.11.3 (although the timing may be a coincidence).

My normal system administrator login was not affected - but another login (which I use for administering a group of IOS devices) was unusable with the following symptoms, similar to those described by other in this discussion:

(1) All operations from login onwards were slow and accompanied by much 'wait disc' spinning.

(2) System Preferences could not be opened.

(3) The dock was scrambled with most icons missing or replaced by the 'plain vanilla app' icon. Attempts to launch any app would yield the message "you can't open application xxx because it may be damaged or incomplete"

(4) LaunchPad would open, but with most icons missing, and any attempt to launch an app would just return the aforementioned message.

(5) You could open a finder window, but if you tried to look at /Applications (with the aim of launching an app by double-clicking directly), the folder appeared to be empty (apart from Mail and the sub-folder Utilities). Some other files and folders were mission from the user's home folder.

I tried lots of suggestions described in these and other discussions, but nothing worked. In particular, I could not start a terminal session under the offending user until I tried starting a terminal session under the system administrators user and them using 'su' to become the non-working user. This revealed that no files or folders were actually missing (relief) , but that for some reason finder could not see the items.

Then I found Linc Davis's posting of 30 Oct 2015 in the thread '10.11.1 update erased all apps'. This referred to the Apple Support Article 'If Share options or Markup is missing after upgrading to OS X Yosemite or El Capitan' [http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203129] which discussed resetting the Launch Services Database.

The result was magic - my system is back to normal. Thanks to all involved in making known the solution.

DavidRowe2. I don't think it's a coincidence.  My update to 10.11.3 did the same thing.  Tried the If Share options or Markup is missing after upgrading to OS X Yosemite or El Capitan - Apple Support without success. Exhaustive searching suggested a security issue.  I followed instructions to disable the system policy controls with:

sudo spctl --master-disable

logged out and back in and now having a working user, albeit with a messed-up dock. The Security preference pane was also unavailable so I re-enabled the policy controls:

sudo spctl --master-enable

logged out, back and security prefs are back.

I found the info here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17713294/objective-c-how-to-change-option-in- security-privacy-via-terminal

use it at your own risk!

Hamoud234 wrote:

 

Great job at solving the problem with your mac but you should not be blaming apple here.

Why?

Because apple is updating the macs to improve security, enhancements to all the apps we use every day, performance and so on, you can't be blaming them for things they didn't do. Another suggestion would be to reset the whole mac. You would lose all your data but that's one way of getting back all the apps that disappeared. You might have to redownload some apps from the mac app store.

Thankfully, my login seems to be behaving normally now following a few other terminal based instructions and reboots.  An awful waste of time.  If a seemingly innocuous, Apple-sanctioned update makes such a mess of things how is not reasonable to hold Apple to blame?  I'm sure many users would be at a complete loss if this happened.  Having a clue and a bit of doggedness meant I could resolve it.  I'm sorry, Hamoud234; we haven't all drunk the kool-aid.

Holy Crap, what a train wreck -- I had this problem today.  Hours of waiting for the "MacOS" Folder to open under package contents to get a shell.  Finally, it dawned on me to copy the executable from my MBP onto a thumbdrive (I had already ejected a different external drive from my Mac Pro, so I knew it could read an external drive).  As soon as I plugged it in, the "MacOS" folder I had been waiting for populated, and I could get a terminal window.

From there, I could run the lsregister -kill -seed command, but first I navigated to the directory.  I don't know why Apple decided the scrolling window on" If Share options or Markup is missing after upgrading to OS X Yosemite or El Capitan - Apple Support " was such a good idea.  It's not like I could cut and paste from one machine to the next.

My Mac Pro is finally coming back to life, 5 hours post what seemed to be a simple update.

Come on please. I had this on my company mac and on my private mac. Off course I blame Apple. They should test the update before releasing it. I checked the net, there are many people having trouble with El Capitan updates. This is not good.

I spend hours and hours to get my work Mac back to life, now I am trying these work-arounds, just starting the terminal takes over an hour. I think it is a disgrace, this is exactly why I was laughing at my friends with Windows, now it has come to the MAC. Mr Ivy makes them look good, Mr Jobs made them working.

Walter

PS

Before anyone responds: YES I know Apple doesn't read this.

Who are you hoping will respond?

Perhaps I only want to relieve my frustration??

If this helps, go for it.

You really shouldn't be blaming apple for things they didn't do. If you would like, you can make a suggestion to apple here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Hi,

Big thanks to everyone! This thread helped me to solve the problem after piecing together replies from different people. It took me a while to get a working terminal window though. I thought I'd post what I did if anyone else is having the same problem.

1. Open a Finder window.

2. Go to the main Applications folder. You can do this by pressing CMD-Up a few times from any of your personal folders to get up the the root of the HD and then click on the Applications folder.

3. Wait until the icons appear. This can take a long time.

4. Scroll down and click on Utilities. Wait for the icons to appear.

5. Right click on Terminal. Select "Show Package Contents".

6. Go to Content/MacOS (again waiting for icons to appear).

7. Double-click Terminal.

At this point I got a Terminal window open, but I couldn't use it as a command was already running in the window. In order to run anything I had to:

8. Open a new Terminal window from the menu Shell->New Window (or pressing CMD-N).

9. Run /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchSe rvices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed

10. Reboot. Everything was working after that, but I had to re-add some applications to the dock because some icons were corrupt.

Cheers,

Ronnie

Wow, this was the fix. It happened to me after an update to 10.11.5.  Didn't know what to do the first time, restored from a Time Machine backup over wifi, which took 2 whole days.

This time, I found this thread.  I had to follow dahlgren325's steps exactly.  It does take a *very* long time for apps to show up in each finder folder.  Once I got to run the terminal command, it finished in about 2 seconds.  Then reboot and everything is perfectly fine.

Thanks!

Just went through all of this after an update from 10.11.2 to 10.11.6, five hours lost till I found this. Exactly the same symptoms, I could see only a handful of apps in a the "Applications" folder, but got all the apps in "Utilities" folder, so I could use the steps just like dalhgren325 described them and start the Terminal from there via  "Show Package Contents". Just do not forget in the step 9 to merge "...LaunchSe rvices..." into ...LaunchServices....

Thanks a lot, Internet! If it were not for this, I would have been forced to do at least a clean new user install.

Radim

MacPro 2010, SSD system drive, NVidia 980 Ti.