Sneaky Bastard

Yesterday my Mac went to Funky Town. I had about 50 applications open, and I did something to thoroughly anger it. Finder and the Dock quit working. I couldn’t close any windows or save any open files. It was pretty hosed. So, from another machine, I logged in via SSH so I could try to gracefully shut it down. After I killed off most of the user processes, I issued a `shutdown -r now`. I thought it would boot up like usual, and i’d be on my way.

It was not to be.

When it rebooted, the machine forced a fsck, finding problems that needed to be fixed, and then to a blue screen where the normal system service messages would appear, such as “Starting Apache web server.” The boot process wouldn’t go any further. I logged in again remotely (thank God the ssh daemon was started) and rebooted it. I put a boot DVD into the drive so I could run Disk Utility’s repair utility. It said that it found problems and corrected them, but upon rebooting it was still foobared. Taking another angle, I booted in single user mode and ran `fsck -fy` and hoped for the best. It *said* that it fixed the problems, however it still wasn’t booting correctly.

I logged in remotely again to see where it was getting stuck. I found that ifcstart and a LaunchService tool were stuck. I rebooted again in single user mode, removed all the files in /Library/Caches and /System/LIbrary/Caches and tried again. Viola! After my SoftRAID mirror finished syncing, the machine runs well.

So, I wonder if the corrupt cache was the cause of the initial problem, or just a byproduct of whatever the root cause was. This is the first time I’ve personally considered that clearing out the system caches preemptively, as many maintenance utilities offer to do, might not be a bad idea. I don’t have a favorite program, but there are many from which to choose: AppleJack, OnyX, Cocktail, TinkerTool System, and probably many others. If you have a favorite, let me know.