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Level 1

36 points

OS X 10.11.5 Bricked My MacBook Pro Primary Account

The latest release of OS X 10.11.5, which was released today, has damaged my MacBook Pro's primary user account. That account will not log in and work properly. All application icons are now the generic icon and when you try to run one of the apps represented by this icon the Mac has this error:

You can't open the application "System Preferences" because it may be damaged or incomplete.

I'm so mad at Apple right now I could spit. This problem coupled with my now bricked iPad Pro 9.7" (from today's iOS 9.3.2 update) and I've had it absolutely had it with Apple's poor update quality and I will never ever for the rest of my life trust another Apple release. The days of trusting and immediately installing all updates are over for me. DO YOU HEAR THIS APPLE?!?!?

I'm done!

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), Early-2015

Posted on May 16, 2016 1:43 PM

Best reply

pinkstones

Level 5

4,228 points

Posted on May 16, 2016 1:52 PM

dwmreg64 wrote:

The latest release of OS X 10.11.5, which was released today, has damaged my MacBook Pro's primary user account. That account will not log in and work properly. All application icons are now the generic icon and when you try to run one of the apps represented by this icon the Mac has this error:

You can't open the application "System Preferences" because it may be damaged or incomplete.

I'm so mad at Apple right now I could spit. This problem coupled with my now bricked iPad Pro 9.7" (from today's iOS 9.3.2 update) and I've had it absolutely had it with Apple's poor update quality and I will never ever for the rest of my life trust another Apple release. The days of trusting and immediately installing all updates are over for me. DO YOU HEAR THIS APPLE?!?!?

I'm done!

Yeah, you're not talking to Apple. You're talking to Apple users. This is a user-to-user support forum. If you feel the need, and it appears that you do, leave Apple feedback. They won't respond, but if enough people all send in comments about the same thing, a fix could appear. I don't know when, but it could.

http://www.apple.com/feedback

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21 replies

pinkstones

Level 5

4,228 points

May 18, 2016 3:38 PM in response to dwmreg64

dwmreg64 wrote:

Can you tag the post using the "Correct Answer" button for the solution that helped you please? That way it's marked for others to grab immediately. Thanks.

The only person who can award points is the person who started the thread. No one else can do that. However, since you didn't start this thread asking for help, no one supplied any answers that solved a question.

dwmreg64 Author

Level 1

36 points

May 18, 2016 4:37 PM in response to pinkstones

Goodness how complicated. lol

dwmreg64 Author

Level 1

36 points

May 18, 2016 9:25 PM in response to dwmreg64

dwmreg64 wrote:

Apple's solution is more streamlined and elegant. Only two commands were entered in Unix to resolve the issue. One was used to find the offending folders in /var/folders and the other was used to remove them.

Find the offending folders for launch services...

sudo find /var/folders -name "*.csstore" -print | grep `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`

Remove the offending folders:

sudo find /var/folders -name "*.csstore" -delete

I did these from another good Admin account on the same machine and restarted afterwards logging in normally. It did take some time for the system to rebuild some caches, etc. Eventually everything worked out okay. So far so good with a few weird problems I'm still figuring out (like a few mail accounts won't go online).

Anyhow use these at your own risk, etc. Always have a backup before executing commands like these.

Btw if you don't have another admin account on your machine - shame on you - that's a necessity on OS X for these kinds of issues.

Good luck!

plus all this fixed my mac...

I also had some additional problems which you might encounter...permissions were messed up on the user's home folder. So I followed these instructions to fix them:

Resolve issues caused by changing the permissions of items in your home folder

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538

Now so far so good. I think I'm completely up and running now.

May 20, 2016 6:13 AM in response to dwmreg64

dwmreg64 wrote:

Apple's solution is more streamlined and elegant. Only two commands were entered in Unix to resolve the issue. One was used to find the offending folders in /var/folders and the other was used to remove them.

Find the offending folders for launch services...

sudo find /var/folders -name "*.csstore" -print | grep `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`

Remove the offending folders:

sudo find /var/folders -name "*.csstore" -delete

This just saved me as well. I've been troubleshooting a beach-balled login all afternoon. Once I found this thread, I was able to sort it from a standard (i.e. not an administrator) account on the same machine via the terminal. This might save someone else a step of creating another admin account:

open the Terminal app
type login [admin account short name]
type your admin password
enter the commands above

Thanks!!

kgasper

Level 1

9 points

Jun 6, 2016 1:23 PM in response to dwmreg64

Well I just wasted countless hours trying to figure this out prior to finding this and a few other similar posts on this problem. My MacBook Pro automatically downloaded and applied the 10.11.5 update and hosed the whole machine up! Thanks Apple! I thought my SSD was corrupt and panicked to make a backup of what I could in Recovery Mode. Since my admin account couldn't even launch the Terminal, nor could I open System Preferences to create a new admin account, my solution was to enter Single User Mode and then run the command to remove the "*.csstore" files in the /var/folders directrory. What a pain in the butt but I do seem to be up and running again as usual.

Thanks again Apple for hours of my life I'll never get back! LOL

Think I'll be disabling that automatic updates setting from now on!

Jul 20, 2016 9:08 PM in response to J. Blake Coco

Had the same problem with the 10.11.6 update and after trying a few things, remembered that I was unable to login after the 10.11.5 update and had to run some commands. I found this thread again, used the exact same commands to find and delete one file and was able to login in again.

Thanks, again!

OS X 10.11.5 Bricked My MacBook Pro Primary Account