I've been having a pretty rough issue with my iMac 5K for a while now:
I use Fast User Switching a fair bit to toggle between a personal and a work user account. It works great most of the time, but every once in a while I'll go to make the switch, type in the password of the account I'm switching to, see the "rotating cube" animation and transition to... a black screen. My cursor is there and responsive, but nothing I do brings up anything visible on screen. Some key combos in my random typing will trigger an alert/error sound (as they would if it was working normally), so I know it's not actually frozen, just that the screen seems to be locked somehow.
In fact, the past couple times this has happened, I will even see my screensaver (the one set for the work account I'm trying to switch to) come up on my iMac's screen. Still, no combination of keys seems to break through -- I've even tried ⌘-⌥-ESC to bring up the Force Quit menu in case that worked. No dice.
To avoid a hard shutdown or at least save things I'm working on, I will sometimes pick up my laptop and use Screen Sharing to get into my personal user account. I can see and work in that account on the laptop but nothing on my iMac's screen changes, and trying to switch within the Screen Sharing view to the other account just gets me that same black screen.
In the end, I often wind up holding the power button down on the back until the machine powers off, but that's got to be bad and I would really rather avoid doing it.
I've run Disk Utility and that comes up clean, so I'm sort of stumped here.
I use Fast User Switching a fair bit to toggle between a personal and a work user account. It works great most of the time, but every once in a while I'll go to make the switch, type in the password of the account I'm switching to, see the "rotating cube" animation and transition to... a black screen. My cursor is there and responsive, but nothing I do brings up anything visible on screen. Some key combos in my random typing will trigger an alert/error sound (as they would if it was working normally), so I know it's not actually frozen, just that the screen seems to be locked somehow.
In fact, the past couple times this has happened, I will even see my screensaver (the one set for the work account I'm trying to switch to) come up on my iMac's screen. Still, no combination of keys seems to break through -- I've even tried ⌘-⌥-ESC to bring up the Force Quit menu in case that worked. No dice.
To avoid a hard shutdown or at least save things I'm working on, I will sometimes pick up my laptop and use Screen Sharing to get into my personal user account. I can see and work in that account on the laptop but nothing on my iMac's screen changes, and trying to switch within the Screen Sharing view to the other account just gets me that same black screen.
In the end, I often wind up holding the power button down on the back until the machine powers off, but that's got to be bad and I would really rather avoid doing it.
I've run Disk Utility and that comes up clean, so I'm sort of stumped here.
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