Writing this from the laptop as my iMac has started playing up with strange ‘freezes’ the likes of which I’ve never seen before – and I’ve had my share of crashes, freezes & hangs over the years!!
First my setup/hardware – which has been “enhanced” since purchase: 27” iMac 2.8GHz i7 - late 2009 - running OSX 10.11.6 24GB RAM - 2x8GB + 2x4GB Internal Drive 1 - Mercury Electra 250GB SSD - boot drive containing OSX, applications and a bare “admin” user account Internal Drive 2 - 3TB Toshiba partitioned as: · 1.5TB volume - containing main user folder plus other data folders · 1.0TB volume - currently empty (earmarked for media files) · 500GB volume - containing my previous SL boot volume This has all been working fine since the rebuild to replace the HDs and boost the RAM. I have been out of town for a couple of weeks but shut down the compute and UPS and removed the plugs from the wall - so no chance of “power glitches” while we were away. On return everything fired up OK (from memory) but pretty soon I had a freeze - I don’t remember the exact sequence but, pretty soon I ended up with just a black screen with a cursor. The cursor continued to respond to the mouse but I could not “wake up” anything else. Command option escape would not open a force quit window and I had no means of knowing if any apps were still running. All I could do was power down using the power button on the back of the iMac. All booted up OK but fairly soon I ran into problems - again I don’t remember the exact sequence but I do remember the desktop going black whilst some open window remained visible but soon I was back at the black screen & cursor. Again, all I could do was power down using the power button on the back of the iMac. At this point, I was worried that I might have some drive problem so I rebooted from my backup clone and used disk utility to run first aid on all drives/partitions. I ran top level on both internal drives and then volume level on all four volumes - in all cases the repair went fine with no issues noted. Back to booting normally and again all seemed fine - for awhile - until another freeze - I just remember I was using Outlook this time. Sometime (I don’t remember when) during all this I remember Acrobat reader opening - unprompted - a couple of times. The first time barely registered - I just quit it - the second time made me think “why did it do that?” I was also trying to research OSX black screen problems - I found plenty of references to this problem but generally associated with incomplete system updates and none with similar circumstances to mine. One common thread on a numbers of these threads seemed to be down to some login problem which made me go the user preference pane where I noticed two new Adobe items in the login items list - which, I guess could explain the unexpected opening of Adobe reader. I have now removed the Adobe items from the login items list but my freeze problems persist and so this was probably non-related. The latest freeze is now ongoing – around 1 hour and I know that only a switch-off at the power button will get me out of it. In this case the only app open was Firefox with two multi-tab windows on screen and one multi-tab window minimised in the dock. It froze with the spinning beach ball cursor – which still tracks the mouse movements. Command-tab would not cycle me back to Finder. Option-Command-Escape would not bring up the force-quit menu. Mousing the cursor over the menu bar showed the spinning ball over all the Firefox menu items but the normal pointer over the right-hand Apple & 3rd party menu items. I have the “fast user switching” menu item on so I clicked my user name to open the drop-down switching menu (I wanted to check if this looked “normal”) however, at that point most of the Apple menu items disappeared from the menu-bar. The Spotlight icon was still showing but clicking that turned the pointer to the beachball and, after a moment, the Spotlight icon also disappeared. At present, both Firefox windows are still showing and I can switch between windows by clicking each window – but not between tabs within the window. The menu bar still shows the left-hand Apple icon but the beachball cursor when over it. The full Firefox menu also shows – but again with the beachball. The Dropbox, 1Password, Malwarebytes and Onedrive menu icons are still showing – but now with the beachball (although originally the shoed the normal pointer cursor). Screen sleep initiated normally and the screen awoke from sleep normally with a keyboard input. UPDATE: I have just shut down using the power button and rebooted and quit the only reopened app (Firefox) and, for the moment, all looks fine. For the moment, I will leave it running while I have lunch and see if runs into any problems just sitting quietly doing nothing (from a user perspective!) UPDATE: Well, it has been running fine for a couple of hours now (but doing nothing) including screen sleep and rewake and system sleep and rewake/login - so I guess I will go back to using it and see if I can find any sort off pattern to the problem. Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions gratefully received. Cheers Neil
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