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

Your comment was posted successfully. We will publish it in a little while, as our blog is moderated.

  • Pavlo

    It works!!! Thanks a lot!

  • Jasper

    Lifesaver! Tried for two days with rebooting, deleting loads of files via terminal in recovery mode, tried reading logs, tried safe mode (did not even work at my MacBook Pro 2017 touchbar). In the end I reinstalled (with keeping files) Mojave and nothing… Than I discovered Verbose mode, found the corpses and presto; here I am. It works!

  • Adrian

    Thanks for the post.
    What If it doesn’t work. After reboot the new cache is not created. I left.thr computer loading for more than half an hour.
    Any help would be really appreciated.

    Thanks.

  • PRuitt

    It’s saying no such file or directory. What am I doing wrong ?

  • Mayank Patel

    Well it did something. After using the commands and restarting the Mac it’s now sitting at half bar for over 5 mins now instead of the full bar issue prior to this. Will update if it does anything ahead of this.

  • Alpesh

    Had the same issue… did what you’ve suggest and Mac started up 👌🏽
    Thank you!!

Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published