Can't get past login screen

Question

Can't get past login screen

I have an iMac (I forget which model) running El Capitan.

It's been a very reliable machine.

I only restart the machine once every few weeks, but yesterday when I shut it down, I could not restart it.

I have four user accounts running on this machine (mine, and my three kids), and the machine gets as far as the selection screen for which account to log in with, but get's no further.

The mouse moves, but fails to respond if I click on anything. I can't select an account to log into.

I thought the mouse might have problems, but when I tried it on another computer, it was fine and all the buttons were working correctly.

Since I can't even select "restart", I have had to do a hard reboot of the machine to see if restarting it would help, but each time is the same. It gets to the account selectiong screen and no further.

Any advice?

Cheers,

Lucien.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Dec 25, 2015 5:27 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 25, 2015 5:57 PM in response to lucienfromdiamondcreek

To add to this, I just found out that my son was using the computer yesterday and said Firefox was "talking" to him, and said he needed to install something, and he didn't know how and ended up shutting down the computer.

I know this is vague, but it's the best I can get out of him.

He does not have admin rights on the machine, so I can't see how he, or some malware in Firefox, could have done too much harm, but should I consider restoring from the last valid time machine backup?

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