[Solved] Strange symptoms...permission issues? Apps not running.

[malibyte]

Hi all -

I have two Hacks, running nearly identical hardware.
One of them has developed a disease which I can't diagnose. The other still seems to work fine.
No new updates since 10.13.6 (running latest version on both Hacks).
Everything seemed to be OK when I did my last image backup (via dd under Linux) of the entire MacOS/Recovery SSD two weeks ago.

Last night I booted up MacOS and found a number of issues:

(1) Noticed right away that the time in the upper right corner was wrong. Opened System Preferences and tried to open "Time and Date" - nothing. Just the rotating beach ball (System Preferences was completely hung), and when I try to reboot, it sits for a while until I get the box asking me to force-kill it to continue the shutdown process.

(2) The Adobe Cloud service (I subscribe to their photography suite) was unable to update any of its apps (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.) - it would download the updates, then fail to install them. It also was unable to sync my photos on the machine with their cloud drive.

(3) Virtualbox: the manager initially comes up, but I am unable to boot any of my VMs - I get this:
"Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component:
SessionMachine
Interface:
ISession {7844aa05-b02e-4cdd-a04f-ade4a762e6b7}"

After force-killing the aborted VM, I can't re-start the VirtualBox manager - nothing happens when clicking on the icon.

Also, some other weirdness is happening - VirtualBox tried to download a very old copy of its Extension Pack, then asks me if I really want to downgrade. It also tells me that the USB settings in my virtual machines are wrong (they're not). Trying to fully uninstall the application works, but it hangs near the end of the procedure when trying to re-install (at the "running package scripts" stage).

(4) Interestingly, Terminal seems to work fine, and the browsers (Safari and Chrome) seem to be OK; I can download files to my home directory. Many other apps seem to work OK.

I tried restoring from my two-week-old image backup - no difference.

Thought it might be a permissions problem. Dr. Google suggested this:
diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`
which did appear to go through the motions, but didn't change anything.

Any ideas? This is incredibly frustrating. This box also native-boots Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows 10 - neither of which has any issues.

Thanks in advance!

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi all -

I have two Hacks, running nearly identical hardware.
One of them has developed a disease which I can't diagnose. The other still seems to work fine.
No new updates since 10.13.6 (running latest version on both Hacks).
Everything seemed to be OK when I did my last image backup (via dd under Linux) of the entire MacOS/Recovery SSD two weeks ago.

Last night I booted up MacOS and found a number of issues:

(1) Noticed right away that the time in the upper right corner was wrong. Opened System Preferences and tried to open "Time and Date" - nothing. Just the rotating beach ball (System Preferences was completely hung), and when I try to reboot, it sits for a while until I get the box asking me to force-kill it to continue the shutdown process.

(2) The Adobe Cloud service (I subscribe to their photography suite) was unable to update any of its apps (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.) - it would download the updates, then fail to install them. It also was unable to sync my photos on the machine with their cloud drive.

(3) Virtualbox: the manager initially comes up, but I am unable to boot any of my VMs - I get this:
"Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component:
SessionMachine
Interface:
ISession {7844aa05-b02e-4cdd-a04f-ade4a762e6b7}"

After force-killing the aborted VM, I can't re-start the VirtualBox manager - nothing happens when clicking on the icon.

Also, some other weirdness is happening - VirtualBox tried to download a very old copy of its Extension Pack, then asks me if I really want to downgrade. It also tells me that the USB settings in my virtual machines are wrong (they're not). Trying to fully uninstall the application works, but it hangs near the end of the procedure when trying to re-install (at the "running package scripts" stage).

(4) Interestingly, Terminal seems to work fine, and the browsers (Safari and Chrome) seem to be OK; I can download files to my home directory. Many other apps seem to work OK.

I tried restoring from my two-week-old image backup - no difference.

Thought it might be a permissions problem. Dr. Google suggested this:
diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`
which did appear to go through the motions, but didn't change anything.

Any ideas? This is incredibly frustrating. This box also native-boots Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows 10 - neither of which has any issues.

Thanks in advance!

You've probably tried this because you sound on-the-ball, but it's the only thing that occurred to me given your description when the other, almost identical box, is still running fine...

Check the BIOS clock on the affected machine. Is it still keeping the correct time and date?

 

[malibyte]

Thanks - yes, checked that earlier - the BIOS clock is fine, and the other two OS pick up the time correctly.

 

[malibyte]

For what it's worth, I never did find the cause of this issue. It wasn't a BIOS setting or anything else obvious that I could find. Wound up doing a full fresh install of High Sierra and re-installing my apps. All seems good now...and yes, I have backups.

 

[jleahy2]

This may sound kind of odd, but, if they're pretty close to identical hardware, have you considered swapping the drives in each machine to see if the problem follows the drives/install or the hardware?

I ended up doing something similar when converting my install from AFS to HFS without reinstalling, and I sometimes wonder if I have some kind of goofy permission issue someplace too, as I sometimes have random/weird issues, but I'm not willing to reinstall everything yet just to see.