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!

  • xeno

    For a newbee like me working with terminal in Apple is not a easy thing. When I run the first one using “/Volumes/…” and “TAB” and filling it out with the “…/opendirectory” command, the answer is “is a directory”. Ten I run the second line, but the answer is: “No such file or directory”. Can you help me out?

  • Steve

    Thank you so much for posting this. After five stressful hours of my MacBook Pro not starting up I found your solution. You saved me a clean install.

  • John

    Thank you ver y muchos, you saved muy life

  • Patrick J Mele

    Your a life saver, as my son had a research paper due for his college final tommorow , in a panic together we could not reboot his Mac until our research brought us to you and this hot fix that worked perfectly using Terminal and you instructions……THANK YOU

  • M. Kordeia

    Hi
    Thanks.. Thanks…
    Surprisingly… after trying every thing else and reaching a real bad situation.. This WORKED for my iMac like magic..

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