iMac High Sierra won't boot. "Too many corpses being created"

I'm having a problem with my late 2013 21.5 inch iMac. Whenever I try to boot it up, the loading bar finishes and is stuck there. I've tried:

Safemode

NVRAM reset

SMC reset

Reinstalling Mac OS twice

Disk utility first aid

Apple diagnostics

In verbose mode, I see everything loading until an endless amount of lines saying "Too many corpses being created"

Is there any possible way to fix this other than wiping my entire disk? (I don't have any form of backup)

Thanks,

iMac, macOS High Sierra (10.13.1), null

Posted on Feb 11, 2018 9:17 AM

Top-ranking reply

rew10000

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Feb 13, 2018 11:28 AM

Sorry if link wasn't clear:

1. Hold down power button to shut down

2. Boot in verbose mode (hold down ⌘V, press power)

3. Confirmed that boot gets stuck with repeated "too many corpses being created" messages

4. Hold down power button to shut down

5. Boot in recovery mode (About macOS Recovery - Apple Support)

6. [Optional] From Recovery mode, Saved a backup image of Macintosh HD to an external drive using Disk Utility

7. From Recovery mode, using terminal, renamed all folders at the root level of Macintosh HD, except those with data I wanted to preserve, i.e. "Applications" and "Users"

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

ls -al (to see what's there)

mv System _System

mv Library _Library

...

I didn't bother renaming the files at the root level.

8. From Recovery mode, selected Reinstall macOS and installed on "Macintosh HD"

9. When asked to create a user, ensured that the short name (account name) matched my existing account name so that this user "inherits" the existing files in "Users".

10. Back in business! (I guess I'll go in and delete the old OS folders using terminal).

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21 replies

Feb 12, 2018 9:17 AM in response to John Galt

I didn't enable time machine.

Feb 13, 2018 9:03 AM in response to John Galt

I've purchased an external drive and I'm contacting apple support to help me restore my data. Thanks anyways.

rccharles

Level 6

13,037 points

Feb 13, 2018 11:22 AM in response to rew10000

Would be helpful if you elaborated a little more. There are several approaches mentioned in the link.

Basically, what did you do?

rccharles

Level 6

13,037 points

Feb 13, 2018 7:14 PM in response to rew10000

Good to know. It's be awhile since I've had to re-install macOS.

Mar 10, 2018 2:16 PM in response to YouFoundOscar

Hi! Could you please explain step by step how exactly you fixed it? Thanks!

jpmedna

Level 1

8 points

Mar 5, 2018 7:38 AM in response to YouFoundOscar

I’ve been trying to resolve this issue for three days. I’ve tried all the usual (safe mode, disk utility repair, reinstallation of OS X).

I had to do the following:

- run a disk utility (cmd-r at startup)

- create a new bootable partition (fortunately I had sufficient space to reduce the soE fo my main partition)

- install OS X on new partition

- make new partition the boot partition

- reboot and effectively set up as a new device

This doesn’t get you your data back. If you have a backup of any kind, such as Time Machine, restore it and off you go. If you don’t, don’t panic.......your data isn’t lost, it’s just on a partition that you can’t access through conventional means. So, I downloaded Easeus - there is a free version that lets you restore up to 2GB, otherwise you have to pay $90 for full version.

This scans your drives and finds the files in the inaccessible partition. I then restored these to a flash drive.

Next job is to create a bootable flash drive and do a clean install of OS X and restore my data.

Not ideal but certainly one solution.

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iMac High Sierra won't boot. "Too many corpses being created"