Accidentally unloaded all launchctl daemons and now can't boot [duplicate]

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I mistakenly disabled all services in Yosemite (10.10), now it can't boot (1 answer)

Closed 4 years ago.

While trying to set up some services (OS X 10.10 Yosemite), I accidentally did a sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ and the screen was frozen immediately. Now my Mac doesn't boot any more. The loading bar is half full, and nothing happens.

Is there a way to restore the daemons with some kind of rescue console? Unfortunately, I don't have a working time machine backup, my external hard drive crashed some days ago.

I can still boot into recovery mode, using Cmd+R while booting. I can also access the terminal. I tried a launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ but it said ‘Operation already in progress’ for every process.

When trying to load the LaunchDaemons files, I was on the rescue partition. After switching to /Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ and doing a launchctl load -w /Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ I got some errors with File already exists, but some other Daemons seem to load.

But I suspect, that they are loaded into the rescue system. So I also tried to use the launchctl file of /Volumes/Macintosh HD/bin/launchctl. But unfortantely, same result, the screen stucks with a half progress bar during startup.

I had a look into the verbose startup (pressing Cmd+V at startup). The last lines, where everything stops are

hfs: mounted Macintosh HD on device root_device
XCPM: registered
VM Swap Subsystem is ON
Darwin Bootstrapper Version 2.0.2: Mon Mar....
boot-args = -v
** /dev/rdisk1 (NO WRITE)
** Root file system
   Executing fsck_hfs (versoin hfs-285)
Warning: couldn't block sleep during cache update
Warning: proceeding w/o DiskArb
/dev/disk1 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
BootCacheControl: Unable to open /var/db/BootCache.playlist: 2 No such file or directory
Bash: /etc/rc.server: No such file or directory
USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 0000000...
bash: /etc/rc.installer_cleanup: No such file or directory
AppleUSBMiltitouchDriver::checkStatus - received Status Packet, Payload 2: device was reinitialized

I also tried to reinstall Yosemite over my old system (without deleting the filesystem, so my data is still there). Unfortunately, the problem stays the same.

Now I can log in in single-user mode (I had to press an additional Enter). After that, I set the filesystem to read with mount -uw /. Then I load all the daemons with launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. And then, surprise it loads my Mac's login screen, and I can login.

But when I try to restart, I have to repeat that step to login (which is kinda annoying…). I also tried to load all daemons with launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons when I'm logged in.

Here I get ‘Operation already in progress’. I read something in the single-user mode that the loading of services is not supported. Does this affect the fully loaded OS X too? I'm not sure if I'm still in single-user mode or not. How can I tell OS X to load all the LaunchDaemons on startup?

Answer 1

for a persistent fix you can login to single user mode, then mount -uw /, and then delete the launchctl override database. I'm not sure for Yosemite, but on Sierra that would be rm /var/db/com.apple.xpc.launchd/*.plist. after that you can just exit or reboot. this is not as a sledgehammer as it seems. the system re-enableds some of its overrides (from various other configuration files i guess) and so you actually get a nice and fresh override db without masses of "disabled: false".