Recover a frozen MacOS
Sometimes MacOS on my MacBook Pro hangs. Symtoms are:
- Dock does not react
- Apple Button does not react
- Spotlight works, applications can be started via Spotlight
- Apps do not react after they have been started
- I can cycle through applications via cmd + tab
Sometimes it is sufficient to restart Dock or the SystemUIServer by running the following commands:
killall -KILL Dock
killall -KILL SystemUIServerIf this doesn't work restarting the MacBook my help. There are several ways to do this:
- run
sudo shutdown -r now - cmd + On/Off Button
- Hold On/Off Button for more than 6 seconds, then press it again
You can hold the shift key while booting to start in save mode. This will take a while.
Once I encountered a situation where none of the above tricks helped. And if even restarting doesn't help, you immediately get the feeling that something is seriousely worng. Well in the end I figured, that my Bluetooth connection was enabled, but my MagicMouse wasn't in range. For some reason the slowed down the whole system. After I disabled bluetooth, everything was fine again. Lesson learned: diable bluetooth if you don't need it.
