Lost power and now unable to log into account that was logged on

ItDragsWhenIWalk · #1 July 20th, 2005, 10:35 AM

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone here has experienced this before. We experienced a power outage and upon restart of all the machines, the user who was logged on when the power outage hit, can no longer log into the system successfully - the only visible thing is the pinwheel of death which spins indefinitely. Strangely, even after the username has been deleted and recreated, the account experiences the same behaviour- the only recourse so far has been to copy the user's profile to a new account that has been created.

This occurred on four machines, all with the same configuration which is:
OS: Tiger, all updates applied
Apps: Adobe Creative Suite CS and CS2 (yes, both are installed), StuffIt Deluxe 8.0, Extensis Suitcase X1, FlightCheck 5, and MS Office X.

The first time I ever encountered this, it was a result of Illustrator crashing, but I don't see any Adobe products hanging in syslog (prior to my pulling the plug on the machine). I can also provide the syslog entry for all these machines if that would be of use.

Thanks

ElDiabloConCaca · #2 July 20th, 2005, 11:08 AM

Boot from the OS X Install CD/DVD and run a "Repair Disk" from Disk Utility (available in the "Installer" menu). UNIX is picky about how it starts up and shuts down, and if certain processes at these times are interrupted or bypassed, data corruption can occur.

ItDragsWhenIWalk · #3 July 20th, 2005, 01:40 PM

Thanks for your response. I'm going to try it out later today and will report back if this solution works.

cticompserv · #4 August 4th, 2008, 05:04 PM

I have this same problem with one particular iMac running 10.4.11. The identical iMac next to it has no problem. My solution is to recreate the Active Directory account for the user, log onto the iMac to create a new local profile, then rename or move the new profile, as admin, so the old profile can be used. After resetting permission on the user's folder he is able to log on normally.

Any suggestions on how to track down the cause of this?

Kent

cticompserv · #5 August 12th, 2008, 10:29 AM

After more research it appears that the problem isn't a permissions issue but very similar to this one, http://grimthing.com/archives/2006/0...hangs_on_boot/ a corrupt Spotlight index database. I'll try rebuilding the index and see if the problem goes away.

cticompserv · #6 September 8th, 2008, 02:32 PM

The problem occurred again on Friday and I had a chance to try a couple new fixes. Another post pointed to the local font cache that could cause the lock-up so I tried deleting the font cache and the Spotlight index and the user was able to log in normally.

These commands did the trick:

sudo mdutil -E / (This deletes the Spotlight index)
sudo rm -r /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/* (This deletes the font cache)
reboot

It still remains a mystery why the problem occurs only for this one user.

Kent