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Running latest OS X Mountain Lion. I shut down hard (held power button until power off) after an application froze and rather than doing force quit I got frustrated and just shut the system down.

Reboot, get to login screen and enter password. Get spinning gear (NOT the beachball) which never stops and login never completes.

Unable to get past this.

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  • Some of your notes suggest you using FileVault 2 (full-volume encryption); is this correct? If so, the "login screen" you're referring to is actually the pre-boot authentication screen, which is quite different (and the Safari-only "Guest" account isn't really an account at all).
    – Gordon Davisson
    Mar 29, 2013 at 23:20

5 Answers 5

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There is a nice website that maybe helpful for you: http://www.cultofmac.com/50685/how-to-fix-common-mac-startup-problems-macrx/

It says about the spinning gear:

Apple Logo with Spinning Gear

Once the spinning gear appears the BSD kernel (Darwin) has assumed command and begins loading device drivers. Shortly thereafter it transfers command to the almighty (and controversial) launchd process. Such are the workings of UNIX.

What this means for us mortals is that when a Mac stalls at the Apple logo or the logo with a spinning gear, it probably has a corrupt Mac OS X installation. It may also be having trouble accessing an internal or external hardware component, but this is less-likely.

Rebooting your Mac in Safe Mode can sometimes get things working well-enough that a second, normal reboot then works normally Hold down the Shift key at startup to boot in Safe Mode. DiskWarrior is also worth a shot (this is by far my most used disk utility). If that doesn’t work, an Archive & Install may be needed.

Hope this helps....

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Try logging in as a guest user, then logging straight back out and logging in as the proper user. Works for me (my machine often, but not always, stalls after entering login details).

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You could also, if you feel comfortable, manually boot into Single User Mode (Command + S right when you boot) and then run fsck -y to check the boot device for issues. Then try mount -uw /. Then if that works, simply type reboot and see if it works (fsck stands for "File System ChecK", so if you did a hard reboot you may have caused some issues with the file system)

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  • Log In as Guest;
  • Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups and Unlock;
  • Create a new Administrator user (optionally delete the old one);
  • Log Out and back in with the new user;

If you choose to delete the old user, it should ask you whether you want to backup that user's files (home dir), otherwise make sure to backup what you need from that user's home dir.

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  • It doesn't login with Guest too
    – Reza
    Jun 15, 2017 at 18:07
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I have the same issue and the other accounts work, it is not disk corruption and running disk utility with first aid mode cannot find any problems.

I am able to ssh from another machine and I notice the stuck process is this:

ps aux | grep -i migr
hackeron           524   0.0  0.0 408818880   8064   ??  S    11:36pm   0:00.01 /usr/libexec/KeychainMigrator
hackeron           500   0.0  0.2 408873648  32560   ??  S    11:36pm   0:00.21 /System/Library/CoreServices/UserAccountUpdater 13.2.1 13.3 22D68 22E252 standard notmigrated

If I then run:

kill -9 524
kill -9 500

This gets me past the spinner and into the desktop.

I'm not sure what caused this.

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