MacOS freezes up and crashes a lot lately

Question

MacOS freezes up and crashes a lot lately

I don't specifically know, but firing up Firefox seems to cause it to hang completely for several minutes and using Photoshop on a large image (e.g. 5Gpix) pretty regularly triggers a crash.

I have the sysdiagnose dump from a hang triggered by starting Firefox. Doing that as Photoshop is crashing the system doesn't work because the dump is saved to /tmp -- a symbolic directory link to a temporary file system. The reboot erases it.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 13.6

Posted on Sep 21, 2024 4:10 PM

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Answer 1

Old Toad

Level 10

210,295 points

Sep 22, 2024 10:38 AM in response to Youdonotneedauniqueusername

Please download and run Etrecheck. The free version is sufficient.

Copy the report as shown in this animated screenshot

and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine the cause of the problem.

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Answer 2

Sep 22, 2024 12:36 PM in response to Old Toad

OK. I'll have to wait until the install/reboot is done. It may take a while, it has been rebooting for two hours. I think it's frozen. No error messages, just a stopped progress bar. I'd re-install, but this Mac didn't come with installation disks like my last one.

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Answer 3

Sep 22, 2024 2:01 PM in response to Youdonotneedauniqueusername

In the process of an Alt-Cmd-R reboot. 25 minutes to go as of now...So, back in a while. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe today. 25 minutes elapsed and the re-install locked up at the same progress point as the reboot. Shift-Alt-Cmd-R ??? I'll wait some more first, but I'm not hopeful.

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Answer 4

Old Toad

Level 10

210,295 points

Sep 22, 2024 2:29 PM in response to Youdonotneedauniqueusername

I've had it stall on be in the past. This is how I got around it: let it go for about another hour and if it's still stuck force quit by holding down the Power button for 10+ seconds. Then restart and it should continue the installation.

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Answer 5

Sep 22, 2024 5:09 PM in response to Youdonotneedauniqueusername

I'm running again. I had to save my home directory (350GB ?!?!?!?!) then reformat the drive. Now, all I have to do is re-install the normal UNIX commands, Chrome, Firefox, Lightroom et al., ON1 et al. and restore my apps with some fraction of those 350GB. (Apps are saving too much data!!! It's mostly cache data that will never be used again.)

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Answer 6

Oct 2, 2024 8:59 AM in response to Youdonotneedauniqueusername

In the end, I was forced to do an over-the-net re-install. I thought I'd posted a final summary:

After the re-install, I unrolled the tarballs of my home directory. Sadly, Apple's flavor of "tar" isn't actually a full archive. It skips files with the executable bit set and it skips directories that are marked "hidden" (like "~/Library", for example). SO, everything got completely destroyed and I was forced to download and re-install my collection of tools.

NOTE TO APPLE: you're screwing with "tar" was a bad idea

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Answer 7

Sep 22, 2024 1:35 PM in response to Youdonotneedauniqueusername

In the process of an Alt-Cmd-R reboot. 25 minutes to go as of now...So, back in a while. Maybe tomorrow.

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