monday morning, unlocked the mac to find it mostly hung. had cursor movement and the menu bar but an otherwise black screen. messages was the “active” app. hovering over the menu bar, got the spinning beachball of death. had menus, though. selected “shutdown”. no joy there. finally resorted to the power button.
after restart, the backblaze menu preference had the spinning beachball of death. its menu refused to display. starting the backblaze app also brought no joy.
rebooted again. things appeared to be working.
this morning, almost same thing although this time my wallpaper was displayed. again messages was the “active” app. same recovery required. this time backblaze seems undisturbed. works as far as i can tell.
because i refuse to update to os26, there’s no point in contacting apple support. also been unable to find any log files indicating what broke. used to be the os considered power switch kill to be a panic and left traces thereof.
looking for suggestions on what could be causing this hang and how to find any traces of its failure.
Assuming all else has failed and you have a Time Machine, or similar, back up, you might need to start the Mac in recovery mode. This essentially restores the Mac to its factory state by reloading macOS and allowing you to erase the HDD/SSD. Then it prompts you to restore settings and data from the Time Machine backup.
I know this because my ancient Intel iMac just died! Unfortunately Recovery Mode did not fix it and I now have a refurbished replacement iMac as my media server.
When Macs hang in the morning, I always suspect the power management. Search the internet or ask AI for how to reset power management for your specific model.