Stuck on User Log-In

[DanielleReina]

Hey, all. I need some help, please, but have to admit, I'm not very knowledgeable about Macs. I have a Mac Book Pro that was updated to the new software within the last few weeks. It had been performing fine until the other day. My husband was on the Internet (Facebook) when he said it froze up. He said he had to hard reboot and is been acting up ever since. When I start it, it takes a long time (several minutes) to get to the user log in screen. I enter my password then it just sits there with a spinning circle and the spinning colorful beachball. I've been waiting for 20 minutes now. Any suggestions? Is it kaput? I looked online and tried to reboot in safe mode, but didn't hear any start-up tone at all. I tried to reset (?) the PRAM (held option-command-P-R) until I heard the two start up tones, but it didn't make any noticeable difference, and I'm still waiting for it to log in (27 minutes now). I appreciate any insight. Thank you! !


Update: I booted into Recovery mode. I ran "Verify Disk" on both my HD and the OS X Base System. Both say they appear to be ok.

Update 2: I verified disk permissions. It found a bunch of Library/Printers permissions that are repairing now. Not sure if pertinent because I haven't had a printer since my dad gave it to me a year ago.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

You have carried out the correct procedure so that's good, I would repair the permissions in Recovery Mode then reboot & see if this improves things. Make sure that all peripherals are removed too.

 

[DanielleReina]

Thank you. Pardon my ignorance, but what are peripherals?
None of what I did last night made any difference. I was able to log in as a guest user, but once the background image came up, it took 4-5 minutes for my toolbar to come up at the bottom and for the top menu bar to come up. At that point, I shut it down because I was frustrated.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Anything connected like printer etc external hard drives …

Can you check how much free space you have on the hard drive? Get Info on MacintoshHD then look in the General section at the top it should say Capacity/Avaliable etc ...

 

[honestone]

A couple of other things to consider are:

1. You can also find out how much free space there is on your internal drive while in the Finder by clicking once on it, going to the File menu, and selecting Get Info. You will subsequently see 1) the capacity of the drive, 2) the amount of Available space, and 3) how much space has been used.

2) If you have a actual hard disk (not an SSD) inside the machine, then maybe doing both a File Optimization and a Volume Optimization might help. Disk Utility cannot perform such tasks, so a third party tool would be needed for that.

3) Quite often, you need to run Repair Permissions more than once to get all the permissions repaired. I use a third party tool called Oynx (free) for disk cleanup/"light" maintenance, and it has a Repair Permissions feature. I usually run it twice when repairing permissions on each of my machines (I do it once a week).

4) If none of that helps you much, and especially if you have quite a bit of free space, having a more robust Disk Maintenance/Repair program would be good to use. And, in this case, it looks like Disk Warrior would be the one to use (possibly TechTool Pro also). Such products do way more than Disk Utility.