Disappearing Dock and other odd errors

TidBITS Talk
1

I have two Macs running the same operating system (currently Sequoia 15.1.1). One runs great, the other has weird issues, which have been present since I purchased it in February 2020 with MacOS 10.15 Catalina—but they’re getting worse:

  1. the dock occasionally disappears; work-around is to toggle System Settings/Desktop & Dock/Automatically hide and show the Dock, but it’s temporary.
  2. clicking the Applications folder in the dock occasionally takes 8-10 seconds to build the list of apps.
  3. opening the trash sometimes take 8-10 seconds.
  4. occasional beach balling in diverse situations; no pattern that I can see.
  5. lots of crashes of daemons, but not repeatedly the same ones.

I have run Disk Utility (oh for Disk Warrior!), and it reports abstruse warnings that I don’t understand. It seems to repair them, but the next run has similar warnings:

Checking snapshot 1 of 22 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2024-12-12-181111.local, transaction ID 52516603)
warning: inode (id 469377504): Resource Fork xattr is missing or empty for compressed file
warning: snapshot fsroot / file key rolling / doc-id tree corruptions are not repaired; they'll go away once the snapshot is deleted
Checking the fsroot tree.
warning: inode (id 469377504): Resource Fork xattr is missing or empty for compressed file
The volume /dev/rdisk2s2 with UUID 1DB9B86D-9A67-43EC-A480-CBD9BD8C5A83 was found to be corrupt and needs to be repaired.
Verifying allocated space.
warning: MT mapping (0x400000097e3ef -> 0x1017e3, 1, C) is not completely referenced
warning: MT mapping (0x4000001a3fc89 -> 0x10c68b, 1, C) is not completely referenced
warning: MT mapping (0x40000036de831 -> 0x16c785, 1, C) is not completely referenced
warning: MT mapping (0x4000003c88a72 -> 0x250605, 1, C) is not completely referenced
warning: MT mapping (0x4000003fe1ac7 -> 0x1032f1, 1, C) is not completely referenced
warning: MT mapping (0x400000cdf24ef -> 0x1065e4, 1, C) is not completely referenced
warning: MT mapping (0x400000d0b81f7 -> 0x105178, 1, C) is not completely referenced
Performing deferred repairs.
warning: need to clear bsd flags (0x20) in inode (object-id 469377504)
warning: found orphan/invalid xattr (id 469377504, name com.apple.decmpfs)
The container /dev/disk0s2 appears to be OK.
Storage system check exit code is 0.
Operation successful.

I’ve reset PRAM, started under Safe Boot, run diagnostics (rebooting with the D key held down), run in Recovery—none of which has helped. Nothing from the console or system logs jumps out at me, although there are plenty of errors.

Running DU on my Carbon Copy Cloner backup disk (but not the boot disk) produces this error:

Checking the EFI system partition’s file system
Problems were found with the partition map which might prevent booting
The partition map needs to be repaired because there’s a problem with the EFI system partition’s file system. : (-69766)
Operation failed…

I’m exasperated! Any pointers as to where to start?

2

Another odd problem is a document opening to full screen when you just click and move it. Click on it again and it goes back to normal.
Frustrating.
David

3

That sounds like the new tiling feature. Turn it off in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Windows. Or just be careful when you move windows to not trigger the tiling rule.

See Tile windows on Mac - Apple Support for more info.

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4

If it were me, I’d make several backups and then erase the drive and restore from backup. Anything that triggers errors in Disk Utility is problematic.

Almost certainly what I wrote about in

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5

I was hoping to avoid that, but yeah, I guess it has come to that. :slightly_frowning_face: Nothing less is likely to do the trick. Thanks for encouraging me to do what I didn’t want to do. :worried: