robertk1

Q: Fix for El Capitan stuck at login

Last month I updated to 10.11.1 and my system would no longer log in.  I would enter my password correctly and then the cursor would change to the spinning pinwheel and just sit there forever.  The only way out was a power off reboot.  I later found that when it was in this state I could SSH into it from another machine, and the system log revealed that /usr/libexec/lsd (the Launch Services Daemon) was crashing repeatedly.  I searched these forums and others and found lots of ideas, none of which helped. 

 

No problem, though, I've got hourly time machine backups, right?  Well, no.  Apparently El Capitan had not been doing the hourly backups so my most recent backup was from sometime in October, which was a month old at the time.  Not good.

 

Fortunately, I had an older boot drive that I put in an external enclosure and was able to boot from that to experiment.  The drive I normally boot from was fine -- permission checks and disk repair and all that all came back good, and I could read and write files to it just fine.

 

After lots of experimentation and frustration I was just about to give up and add another drive to do a clean install and start moving everything over -- a process that I *really* hate doing.  But one last web search and a bit of luck gave my one last shot at fixing it.

 

To do this, you'll either need to be in a recovery console, or ssh into the machine, or boot from an external drive, or otherwise somehow get to a command prompt.  Once you are there, do this:

 

find /private/var/folders/ | grep com.apple.LaunchServices | grep csstore

 

Note that if you boot from an external drive, you need to run that command against the boot drive you are trying to fix.  Just add the /Volumes/Whatever_Your_Boot_Drive_is to the path, like so:

 

find /Volumes/YourBootDriveHere/private/var/folders/ | grep com.apple.LaunchServices | grep csstore

 

That will find the cache databases that Launch Services is using.  They will have long and random-looking names that end in csstor.  Make a note of every file shown, then delete them, by a command like this (obviously using whatever paths the above command found instead of this example):

 

rm  /private/var/folders/cd/someLongRandomNameHere/someFolderNumberHere/com.apple.L aunchService-whatever.csstore

 

If you're more cautious, you can rename them instead of deleting them, so you can put them back if necessary.  That would look like this:

 

mv  /full/path/like/shown/above/to/whatever.cssstore /full/path/like/shown/above/to/whatever.csstore.backup

 

After removing or renaming those files, restart your Mac.  You should now be able to log in.  Or at least, that's what finally worked for me.  The login did take longer than normal -- a few minutes -- to rebuild those files, but the desktop finally appeared, and now I'm back to running on my normal boot drive. 

 

Hopefully this helps someone.

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Dec 13, 2015 3:47 AM

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Q: Fix for El Capitan stuck at login

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  • by rossh51,

    rossh51 rossh51 Mar 25, 2016 5:12 AM in response to rossh51
    Level 1 (17 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 25, 2016 5:12 AM in response to rossh51

    Thank you robertk1! This worked perfectly for me on 10.11.4.

     

    Liberal use of "cut and paste" speeds this process up. I had 6 files to remove.

     

    Seems like Apple need to do a bit of work on their installer!

  • by SailMobile,

    SailMobile SailMobile Mar 25, 2016 10:53 AM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 25, 2016 10:53 AM in response to robertk1

    Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.

     

    After I found you post, still went through Apple Support.  They were unable to help me.

     

    I was able to login as ROOT and run terminal and did as you suggested (copying and pasting from find response).

     

    Computer rebooted and shows no ill effects.

     

    Thanks again.

  • by dj_vahn,

    dj_vahn dj_vahn Mar 26, 2016 1:39 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mar 26, 2016 1:39 PM in response to robertk1

    Cheers +1. Worked for as me well going from 10.11.3 to 10.11.4.  I was pulling out what little hair I have left thinking I was looking at a full system restore.

     

    Just a quick note of thanks for taking the time to document the problem and solution. It came up basically as the number 1 hit in Google. You saved me hours and hours of time and frustration.

     

     

  • by eques,

    eques eques Mar 27, 2016 6:10 AM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mar 27, 2016 6:10 AM in response to robertk1

    Thank you. You saved the day!

  • by Cfax,

    Cfax Cfax Mar 29, 2016 4:13 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 29, 2016 4:13 PM in response to robertk1

    It does not help me. I still stuck on Login Page(((((

  • by jmshapiro,

    jmshapiro jmshapiro Mar 31, 2016 4:13 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (11 points)
    Mar 31, 2016 4:13 PM in response to robertk1

    This helped me. I had the same problem after upgrading from 11.3 to 11.4. I was able to set up a new user using SSH and was about to go through a complicated process of backing up and restoring the OS. I tried this solution using rm `<the find command>` and it resolved my problem.

     

    Thanks for posting.

  • by mawolfe52,

    mawolfe52 mawolfe52 Apr 2, 2016 9:39 AM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apr 2, 2016 9:39 AM in response to robertk1

    This worked like a charm -- for one day.   After the first night's "sleep," back to the same nonsense.  The real solution is for Apple to FIX THE PROBLEM, starting with building better computers and software.

  • by tom.francen,

    tom.francen tom.francen Apr 3, 2016 10:45 AM in response to mawolfe52
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apr 3, 2016 10:45 AM in response to mawolfe52

    confirmed for me ... apple support was clueless ... this post wasnt!   ... great job guys ...

  • by hovering,

    hovering hovering Apr 14, 2016 8:41 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apr 14, 2016 8:41 PM in response to robertk1

    Worked for me. One user login got stuck at a spinning wheel.

    Boot in recovery mode. Open terminal. Search as described. I had only one file to delete.

    Problem solved.

     

    Thank you!

  • by philly7789,

    philly7789 philly7789 Apr 15, 2016 11:58 AM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Apr 15, 2016 11:58 AM in response to robertk1

    Thank you!!!!  I was on the verge of rebooting from an old SuperDuper backup before I found this post.  Worked perfectly and I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. 

  • by ddgiants,

    ddgiants ddgiants Apr 19, 2016 8:32 AM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apr 19, 2016 8:32 AM in response to robertk1

    Dude...BRAH!!!! You're the man. THANK YOU!

     

    Side note - these Apple updates need to get their sh@! together. This is not the first time this has happened either with El Capitan or Yosemite.

  • by Ross Heitkamp,

    Ross Heitkamp Ross Heitkamp May 3, 2016 9:27 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (19 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 3, 2016 9:27 PM in response to robertk1

    So awesome.   I was down for a week after the update to 10.11.4 and had already reinstalled El Crapitan before I found this - that did NOT work, BTW.  Tried many other useless things, like booting into safe mode.  (crap, it won't let me type now unless bold or italics are on) 

    This fix worked first time. I read so many otherthreads that were no help.  Boy has Apple lost their touch

  • by Lyle Berman,

    Lyle Berman Lyle Berman May 16, 2016 3:00 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (19 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 16, 2016 3:00 PM in response to robertk1

    WOW - this is a life-saver!
    After an update to 10.11.5, my user wasn't logging in at all.

    This fixed it! Thanks so much!!!!

  • by Gjutr vhuutf,

    Gjutr vhuutf Gjutr vhuutf May 17, 2016 12:08 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 17, 2016 12:08 PM in response to robertk1

    I had the same problem after upgrading to 10.11.5 and your procedure fixed the problem. You can also do it if there's another account on the machine that can still be logged into. If you want to do it from another account, you'll probably need to prefix each of those commands with sudo to override permission problems (e.g., "sudo find ...", "sudo rm ...").

     

    Thank you for the solution to this problem!

  • by adambplummer,

    adambplummer adambplummer May 19, 2016 10:06 PM in response to robertk1
    Level 1 (9 points)
    May 19, 2016 10:06 PM in response to robertk1

    I just updated to 10.11.5 and had this same problem. This article saved me!

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