Dan,
Glad you figured out your issue, hope File Vault is the answer. Wish I
could be so lucky. I ran Disk Warrior and found no issues with mine and
neither did Apple's Hardware test. Took it to the Apple Store last year to
see if it was part of the recall on the discrete video cards. They blamed
it on OS X Lion I was running at the time and told me it just needed to be
updated to El Capitan, which I did and it still has issues. The video card
recall ran out in February and I never could get anyone to acknowledge
that was the culprit, but I've gotten various forms of artifacts when
using the computer as well - vertical lines, a multi-colored horizontal
line, the screen just going black with power still on, etc.
Sometimes I get just a gray screen after the progress bar and it hangs
there, other times it does the rebooting itself thing. Occasionally a boot
into Safe Mode, Single User mode or Target Disk Mode and then another
reboot will get it back up and running, other times it just has to sit for
a while till it decides it's ready to work again. I've seen reports that
these models tend to overheat and that could explain why it will come back
up after it sits for a while. I have noticed the upper left corner of the
computer gets awfully hot at times. Here lately the only thing I've been
running on it is Outlook to monitor email, so it shouldn't be anything too
processor intensive that would have it getting that hot. Sometimes when it
comes up to the gray screen it sounds like the fan is really ramped up. I
quit using my Speck case and keyboard protector thinking they were holding
in too much heat, but no luck there either.
Yesterday morning and today I've been having trouble and it had been
sitting unused and turned off at work since 3pm on Friday till I came in
yesterday. The battery was low yesterday morning so don't know if it could
be a power issue too? I've reinstalled El Capitan a couple of times and
the problem always resurfaces. Sometimes I can be in the middle of
something and it will just shut itself down. I've tried all different
sorts of boot modes, NVRAM & SMC resets, etc. and I've not gotten anywhere
with it. It will work fine for a day or two and then I'm back to the same
issue. I've been keeping a detailed list of what has been going on and
what I've done to correct and think I may make another Apple Store trip
and tell them to keep it until they can get it working reliably again. I
can't count on this computer to do any critical work as I never know when
it will just quit working. Luckily it is not my main computer, but I do
need to use it to do some testing for our workflow and it just isn't
stable enough for that at this point.
Good luck with yours and hope File Vault was the culprit!
From: Dan Crutcher
Update: Another oddity was that the ?automatic login? feature under
Users & Groups was grayed out, so I couldn?t choose it. By Googling
?automatic login,? I discovered that automatic login is disabled if
FileVault is active on an account. I had forgotten that I?d turned it on a
couple of months ago. I turned off FileVault and now see both users when I
start up and am able to set automatic login and am able to boot into the
account of the user that was not letting me do so before. Problem
(temporarily?) solved.
Not sure is FileVault was the culprit, but that?s my current working
hypothesis. Am still going to run Disk Warrior when it comes.
Beth Phillips
IT Associate
PHONE | 800-626-6409 x8385
DIRECT | 502-222-8385
EMAIL | [email protected]
WEBSITE | www.Fastline.com
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