Anyone else have their older 10.11.X computers killed by the Jan 23 update?

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Level 1

8 points

Anyone else have their older 10.11.X computers killed by the Jan 23 update?

Did the updates today on a 2009 27" iMac running 10.11.6 and the system is now unusable because it is so slow.

As a test trying to list the contents of the Applications folder, which after a little over 19 minutes showed all of the icons, but only says TWO items are in the folder.

Contacted Apple support through chat and they suggested I re-install the OS, which didn'nt help at all.

Whatever the Meltdown Spectre CPU fixes did, has now rendered my Mac useless.

How do I undo that security patch so I can run the Mac again?

I hope Apple is watching this as this is very very serious. So we need a method to undo what the Jan 23 patches did.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Jan 23, 2018 5:25 PM

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Answer 1

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DRQA77 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 24, 2018 1:32 PM in response to cathy fasano

Thanks Carolyn, Cathy and Eric for the tips.

I wound up reformatting the drive and am cloning a backup onto it now.

Just for other people's knowledge, I was unable to repartition my drive when booted in Recovery mode. I had to actually boot from another external drive and then Disk Utility would let me erase and partition my drive. Once I was able to do this, I began the clone process.

Before I started the whole clone process I did reinstall macOS 10.11.6 onto the drive from Recovery mode (before re-partitioning) and then applied the latest 10.11 updates and everything worked OK with a new OS installed. Once I ran through that I then proceeded to where I am now to restore a full working system using a cloning operation.

Also thanks to Danielle at OWC for her assistance in re-partitioning the drive.

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Answer 2

Jan 23, 2018 5:27 PM in response to DRQA77

Hi,

Check the hard drive to see if it needs repairing...

Startup your Mac while holding down the Command + R keys.

From there you should be able to access the built in utilities to verify and repair the disk if necessary using macOS Recovery.

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Answer 3

Jan 24, 2018 11:40 AM in response to DRQA77

I saw a similar-sounding problem a couple of months ago that had nothing to do with any update. I have fast user switching turned on and could switch back and forth between two accounts. When one account was "in front" everything was pretty normal, but when the other one was in front the system was totally unusable. Using the account that was working, I ran the Console application and I could see that the launch services deamon was crashing and restarting every few seconds.

If you are able to boot from another drive, you need to look at /private/var/log/system.log on the affected system and see if you can see something crashing. If the disk is full it may be because it's filling up your disk with crash dumps. If it is lsd, this thread will tell you how to fix it (deleting some corrupted cache files) Re: What is happening with the LSD and repeated crash?

If nothing appears wrong from the system.log, you should run the etrecheck program that Eric linked to.

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Answer 4

BobHarris

Level 9

53,081 points

Jan 28, 2018 8:51 AM in response to krazikofiman

krazikofiman wrote:

My 2011 iMac 12,2 went into multiple reboots after the 2018 update. Still in process of restoring.

Since this thread is marked Solved, it is not going to get as much traffic as you may desire.

I would suggest you start your own new thread (see the "Post" button at the top of this page).

In your "New" thread, please post the output from EtreCheck.

<https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6174> or <https://etrecheck.com>

If you cannot currently boot, try booting into Safe mode

<http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564>

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Answer 5

DRQA77 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 23, 2018 6:48 PM in response to Carolyn Samit

Hi Carolyn,

It appears the update trashed my boot drive. I was able to run first aid from the Recovery Volume, but that didn't help. The drive info kept showing the drive as full when it should have had 245GB free. I will contact the drive manuf tomorrow and see if they have seen this with other drives.

At this point I do not know if this is an issue with Apple or the drive, but the computer was used all day prior to the update and worked just fine. After the update, WHAM! Unusable with the same boot drive as before the update.

I have booted from other disks and they seem to be OK, although a bit slow, thus my comment that at present I believe the latest Apple update damaged my boot drive. FYI, my boot drive is an OWC 3G SSD, so booting from a non SSD will be a lot slower, but at least the Finder responded from the other boot drives whereas from my orig SSD drive if you click or double-click on anything, better go take a long lunch before the spinning beach ball of death disappears and then take another break after each mouse click.

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Answer 6

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Jan 24, 2018 10:11 AM in response to DRQA77

Try running this program in your normal user account, then copy and paste the output in a reply. The program was created by etresoft, a frequent contributor. Please use copy and paste as screen shots can be hard to read. On the screen with Options, please open Options and check the bottom 2 boxes before running. Click “Share Report” button in the toolbar, select “Copy Report” and then paste into a reply. This will show what is running on your computer. No personal information is shown.

Etrecheck – System Information

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Answer 7

Jan 28, 2018 6:06 AM in response to DRQA77

My 2011 iMac 12,2 went into multiple reboots after the 2018 update. Still in process of restoring.

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