Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that customers have reported similar symptoms in the tech queue: sleep/wake problems, booting to black screen with a cursor, and generally, things that I haven’t seen in OS X before (though some were close).
After searching the Apple forums, I came across a few articles that referenced booting to black screen with cursor, sleep/wake and OS issues, and a couple that included problems triggered by something plugged into the USB ports or a change in power state while sleeping. No one could seem to pin down the specific cause, but they were always fixed by either updating software or restoring the operating system.
I followed some of the advice found, and it worked for the troublesome machine with the black screen problem, but not for the other machine with performance/sleep issues. On the latter, by wiping it clean and updating the OS, I managed to get the computer responding normally. It passed all hardware tests, so I moved the customer’s data back over and called him for pickup.
However, we then saw that apps weren’t loading and there were general performance issues. So, I focused my efforts on the software since it seemed that we must have a data corruption issue. After a little troubleshooting and some input from another technician, the problem was narrowed down to the customer’s user account. “It doesn’t make sense…I had just wiped it clean and tested…everything worked before,” I thought, but of course, this was before I transferred the customer’s data back over.
We created a test account and lo and behold, everything worked fine. Somewhere within the customer’s data was a setting, flaw or troublesome file that was prohibiting it from performing properly.
To fix an issue like this, we either migrate just the important data files (e.g. documents and pictures) over to the new user account, or reinstall the operating system with an install image without removing any of the user data. Nine times out of ten, reinstalling the OS while keeping user data intact corrects the issue, but for this customer, we opted to pull the important files over.
I recommend backing up at all times, because in the event that a reinstall over the top didn’t fix the issue, the last resort would be to restore your machine back to factory settings, in which case, all your data would be gone.
When it comes to troubleshooting, I can usually figure the issue out, but there’s a lot to still learn about software and hardware interaction and I will admit that I’m no software expert. I learned my lesson with this one, and while this had a happy ending, remember to back up!
