Too many corpses being created!

Your Mac running macOS High Sierra 10.13 stopped at the startup screen that shows the Apple logo with a progress bar. You entered verbose mode with cmd-V and it shows a repeating message of "Too many corpses being created."

No, your Mac wasn't infested with zombies. There's no need to smash it with an axe and throw it in fire. This is what you could do:

  1. boot and hold cmd-R to start up from macOS Recovery
  2. if Filevault is on, mount the disk with Disk Utility and password
  3. run these two in Terminal
  • cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/var/db/caches/opendirectory
    (this should be one line and also use an escape character \ before each white space in the disk name, such as My\ Fancy\ Disk\ Name - if you actually just type /Volumes/, then a few letters and press TAB, it should fill the rest)
  • mv ./mbr_cache ./mbr_cache-old
  • restart

The first startup after running these commands takes a bit longer than usual as the cache is recreated, but subsequent startups will take the normal amount of time.


72 comments

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  • Pavlo

    It works!!! Thanks a lot!

  • Roy Kossley

    I tried on my MacBook Air (MacOS X ) version 10.14.6 and it work perfectly.
    For those of you who cannot locate this file error “no file exist”
    type: find / -name opendirectory -this should show the correct path to mbr_cache file.

  • Goblinslog

    I’ve been looking all day to get rid of those corpses and all I was getting was “There is no such directory” on Single user mode. The problem was my Mojave installation is on unsupported mac and I don’t have the recovery partition working, so CMD+R wouldn’t work. So, I installed Mac OS on one 64GB memory stick from my other mac and boot it from there. I changed the defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles to true, found the var folder and from there to opendirectory where I erased the mbr_cache file. Rebooted and all worked like a charm. Hope this will help someone else with similar problems. Thank you!

  • Luna

    Cannot describe how thankful and happy I am for this instruction! Spent hours of hours and days trying solving this bug, reading a lot in forums. THIS saved my MacBook Pro 2012! First I was surprised that nothing happened after typing the 2 codes. I did a restart and nothing happened again. Then finally I restartet again and it worked!!! :-) :-) THANK YOU!
    (Problem with High Sierra 10.13.4).

  • Deanna

    I tried it and terminal says no file exists

  • Randy

    Soooo thankful to you!!! This just worked for me after spending hours reading posts and watching videos. After reading your post and simply running the commands you posted, I am up and running in just a few minutes! (5-7-21)

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