Probably the wrong place to ask, after all I don't go on a computer forum to ask which fuel is best, but here goes.... My Mac has developed an issue I can't seem to get round. A short while back, an update failed and now the computer won't shutdown (I get a spinning wheel and it hangs while shutting down indefinitely) I have to hold the power button at this stage to turn it off. When it starts back up, it asks if I had shut sown unexpectedly. I appear to have lost some disk space and have a volume on the main disk I can't delete. Time machine back-ups no longer work and get stuck in the "preparing backup" stage. I have recently had some Malware called Tapufind (I was careless during a software download and accepted this b**tard of an add on by mistake) which was a real pain to get rid of, but that seems to be sorted now. I think I'm going to have to format the drive and start again to solve this, unless I'm missing something. Pic of the rogue volume on Disk Utility, below.
Not an expert at all but I think the greyed our area is what the system considers as ‘purgable’ files.
Do this first - https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac/ Install Malware Bytes and do a scan, should tell you what shouldn't be there. Can you reboot it and hold down shift? This puts it in Safe mode. Let me know what this does. You'll need a wired keyboard for this, as it's hit and miss with a bt one. Out of interest, how often are you shutting it down? I probably shut mine down once or twice a year, if that.
Yep, I’ve tried safe mode, recovery mode and reinstalled Mojave in recovery mode. No difference to my issue. i shutdown most nights unless it’s doing something
Try Blue Harvest aswell, if you haven't already. I believe you can do a free trial - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blueharvest/id739483376?mt=12 Have you looked in Applications for anything which shouldn't be there? Mackeeper for example.
I’ll take a look at blue harvest. ive been through Applications, nothing there. Had a look at what processes are running, no luck. I think it’s a leftover volume from the failed update, but buggered if I can get rid of it. I think the computer is looking at this disk as it shuts down but this corruption is causing the problem
Here are a couple of things you could try. First restart holding down [p][r][option][command] this does a parameter ram reset. Hold those keys until the Mac chimes twice, then let go. Next us onyx to run the suite of housekeeping tools/scripts. You could also run disk utility to fix any catalogue errors.
I've done all that apart from oynx. I left the update going when I left for work this morning, but it looked like it had hung, tbh.
If you haven't already done so, create a new user account. Try some tasks within it and see if it behaves any differently or if it cures the problem. If it does then it's something in your personal user system library that's gone awry. However it doesn't explain all of it. Are your time machine volumes APFS as since Sierra it's been really fussy with volume format in that respect. If none of this has worked you're probably better off at this stage doing a clean install - maybe on another freshly formatted partition or volume and see if there is any difference. At the rate they're pumping out OS releases now you're better off waiting for the first big combo update of each one before installing it.
Yep, I'm going to just wipe it and go for a fresh install. Just waiting for a few hours when I can get everything I want to keep from the main drive onto a portable disk, plus all saved e-mails from Outlook. As Time Machine is not backing up I want to make sure I get it all.
With outlook make sure you export your whole account as as it royally shits itself when trying to restore from a tm backup