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Reboot remote Mac with frozen Finder

Doc69

Doc69

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 21, 2005
653
90
I'm traveling and can access my Mac Pro at home either through back to My Mac or TeamViewer. However, the Finder is frozen so I can't access the files I want. Right now, Disk Utility is also frozen and Spotlight indexing has been going on for 24h and says it has 25h to go.

What can I do to bring the Mac back to life? When I restarted the computer remotely the last time, it froze on the light grey screen while ******** down and actually never shut down. So it became totally inaccessible to me. I had to have someone go to my home and force a restart with the on/off button. However, I don't have anyone that can do that now.

What do you think would happen if I relaunched the Finder? If I remember correctly, this has also resulted in a totally frozen computer in the past.

I've read in other forums about terminal commands for rebooting. Is there any such command or other script that will make 100% sure that it reboots? If that was available, it would probably solve my problem.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,

Are you 100% sure that "sudo shutdown -r now" will reboot my system and not just shut it down?

Also, if a normal reboot through the Apple menu will freeze the computer during the shutdown process, will "sudo shutdown -r now" be able to get past that? What I need is a "hard" reboot, something akin to pressing and holding the power button. But I also need it to boot back up afterwards.

Is it a correct observation that certain Macs restart if you press and hold the power button, and that some Macs shut down instead? I think my Mac Pro at home shuts down. Or is it just a matter of how long you press the button?
 
I have tested it and can confirm that locally it does restart my Macbook Pro.

I can't test remotely, though.

"Also, if a normal reboot through the Apple menu will freeze the computer during the shutdown process, will "sudo shutdown -r now" be able to get past that?"
I believe it will.

"Is it a correct observation that certain Macs restart if you press and hold the power button"
Never seen such a behavior on Macbooks and Macbooks Pro.
For Mac Pro, I don't know.

(for info you should be able to restart remotely by sending an email. This need to create an AppleScript and a rule in Mail on the remote machine.
Sending the email runs the Applescript and restart the machine).
 
I ran "sudo shutdown -r now" on the remote machine. At first, it looked like nothing happened. But then I realized that I could no longer launch any software, including closing Terminal. However, I could still access the items in the menu bar. But after logging out of TeamViewer, I can now no longer access the Mac, and it no longer shows up under "Shared" in the Finder on my Macbook Pro. So the Mac Pro froze in the same way as shutting it down through the menu bar did before.

But thanks for the help. It was worth a shot.
 
For future reference, I would have ran killall Finder in the terminal and then ran the reboot command. Did you try that?
 
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