Black Screen and spinning wheel of death

[sraveendran]

Hi JAMF Community,

We are seeing an issue where some of our Macs would just freeze and show the spinning wheel at login.

Once you accept the security banner, instead of going to the login window it just gets stuck at the black screen and then it freezes (with the spinning wheel). Even on restart it follows same pattern. When i do fdesetup -authrestart it works sometimes, but it comes back again after a week or so. Our Macs are FV enabled with McAfee encryption. Do anyone here face the same problem?.

Thank you

[roiegat]

I have a couple iMacs that are doing this. Seems odd, but it goes away after a couple reboots. Worst case scenario, I boot it up into safe mood and reboot and it's ok.

The one thing I found that causes it, and we don't use here, is iCloud authentication. So if you have your mac's set to use the persons iCloud password - that could be causing it.

For us, it's only happen on new iMacs. All our laptops seem to be fine.

UPDATE: Also resetting the PRAM seems to help occasionally.

[chris_miller]

So it happens after you login but before loading the desktop? Sounds like launchd is getting hung up.

[sraveendran]

Safe Mode works fine. But once you go back to normal login it gets stuck again. @roiegat I did see lot of icloud requests when i checked the logs and the user did have his icloud account on it. Told him to turn it off and see how it behaves.
I read so many posts about mcafee and login issues, could that cause it?

[chris_miller]

I'm not using McAfee, so I don't know. It's worth testing to be sure. It would make sense that an error in the decryption would affect them this way. I assume it works similarly to file vault?

[vanschip-gerard]

Im seeing the same with some of our machines, very random. Combo of SEP and Filevault2. Double policy banner with a long black screen pause between. Everything works fine but obviously its annoying to the 140 users we have.