I have a 1 year old Macbook Pro. On startup, everything seems normal. I put in my password, the desktop briefly appears then it goes black. It works fine on the guest "safari only" account.
Any thoughts on how to fix or trouble shoot?
Thanks
Stuart
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)
Try doing a safe boot by holding the shift key during boot up. Does the problem happen there as well?
Safe boot worked fine. Screen did not go black. I checked for updates and I am current. I then restarted and the same problem happened again.
I see. There is some third party software that has a launch agent or kernel extension which is causing the issue. Safe mode loads the OS without any of those third party processes, so the fact that it works fine there is what points to third party software. Tracking down which software is the culprit could be difficult. If you want, you can post an EtreCheck report here and someone can look through it: http://etresoft.com/etrecheck.
I ran the EtreCheck program. Only two line items came back red. One was that I did not have TimeMachine running and the other one is as follows:
[failed] com.apple.watchdogd.plist (2015-11-13)
I was running in safe mode. Could this be why this came up?
I then deleted my recently installed 3rd party apps. The problem is still happening. I see the desktop for about 1 second then it goes black. I am forced to turn it off by holding down the power button.
Stuart
At this point I would suggest reinstalling OS X. I would suggest restoring from a Time Machine backup but it sounds like you don't have one. Once this is resolved, I recommend that you start making regular backups.
To reinstall OS X, see How to reinstall OS X - Apple Support.
Macbook Pro - Display Goes Black
