Macbooks stuck on loading after login screen.. Help!

andyfreeman
New Contributor

Some weirdness going on over the last few weeks - Not sure if this is a Jamf issue or an OS issue. But people may have seen this before so thought it was worth a try.

I've had 5-6 users so far that are coming up to me after a computer restart saying they can no longer log in. They pop in their credentials, but then it gets stuck forever with the loading bar on 100% after putting in their details. Same deal for our admin account.

First thing I tried was an OS reinstall - which then got to the point that I could put in the credentials again, this time a second login screen comes up, for which it doesn't accept the credentials.

If you log in as guest, that works - but it doesn't accept any admin credentials, and the admin account, and the users account are no longer showing on the list of users.

Has anyone seen this kind of thing before?

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

6 REPLIES 6

jalcorn
Contributor II

Do you have file vault enabled?

wesleya
Contributor

I think some more details would help here. What OS is installed? How are accounts created (bound to AD, local, etc.)? Also, are you using anything like FileVault?

McGinn
Contributor

Are you bound to OD and trying to log in with a user account?

mkolb
Contributor

Hi, sounds like you work with network accounts, which check their credentials against an ActiveDirectory/OpenDirectory? I saw this problem before, when the Mac has an active connection to check the credentials and (for any reason) there is a problem, your user can't log in. This could be because the password expired, the account got locked, the password is just wrong, the account got deactivated,..

Maybe check for their accounts and try to log them in to an other client, which hasn't shown any troubles yet.

If their accounts are fine, also check the "simple things"... for example the system time. If the clien'ts time (and date!) is more than five minutes apart from the network time, ActiveDirectory for example would refuse any connection. I have seen clients with this kind of problems where the simple solution was to set the time correctly.

But like wesleya said, more details would be helpful :-)

aaronj
New Contributor III

I've run into this as well. My observations have been that it's happened mostly on older systems, mostly on High Sierra, but not exclusively to either. A reboot allows login without issue, but if you log in via SSH before a reboot, I would bet that you'll find that there is an active run of jamf policy, likely with a start time at least 24 hours in the past. The most frequent process I see being run at the same time is /usr/sbin/diskutil info /. The issue recurs on the same machines.

On a few of the machines affected, when I reset the printing subsystem for another issue, the problem stopped recurring.

On any of the affected machines where I have upgraded the OS, the problem stopped recurring.

I have a feeling it happens more often than users report the issue, as some know to just power cycle their Mac and attribute it to "one more computer thing".

aaronj
New Contributor III

Here's another thread where I reported similar behavior, with a little more information than I gave above.