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kschendel

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 9, 2014
1,274
548
I'm curious whether anyone else has seen this ...

iMac 9,1 (early 2009), 8 Gb, SSD, upgraded from El Cap using dosdude1's patcher. I upgraded the existing installation rather than doing a clean install. Upgrade went fine, everything seems to work, *except* the App Store. If I go into app store under Featured or Top Charts, I can move around, click on an app to look at the description, all works fine. If I click the Updates tab, I get about a half-spin of the activity wheel in the window title bar, then it freezes. The only way out is to force quit. Activity monitor says that App Store is doing something, but only a very very little bit of it, and no other process is obviously spinning or using CPU.

I've tried all the voodoo I could find on the net: put Bootcamp into spotlight exclusions (!!), delete various caches, run it in safe mode, etc. Nothing helps. Interestingly enough, as I was poking around in Terminal, I tried "strings foo.bar" and was told that I needed to install the command line tools. Fine, I click on install, and *that* froze as well. (In that case you don't get the pizza of death, but nothing happens, and the Stop button doesn't do anything, and I think I had to force quit it to exit.)

Has anyone run into this? and, what would be common to both app store update and the command line tools installer? General networking seems to be OK (mail, web, etc), and in fact it (sometimes) seems to get far enough to discover that I have three updates to install, but that's about it.

(I poked around in the force quit report for a couple minutes, but didn't see anything obvious other than the fact that all of the app store threads are waiting on something or other.)

If nobody has any ideas, I guess the next step is a clean install; but that will have to wait a couple weeks until I have a day to screw around with the machine again. Full backups move a bit slowly (USB 2) and I'm not about to run a clean install without a full backup first...

edited to add one more symptom: if I click on the Store menu item, it freezes immediately without showing the menu. I can however access the iTunes store just fine, so it wouldn't seem to be generically apple-store related.
 

alexclst

macrumors member
Dec 24, 2007
64
41
Saint Paul, MN
What is common to both App Store Updates tab and installing the developer command line tools is the Software Update mechanism. Based on what you say I think that is where something is messed up. What happens when you run softwareupdate in Terminal. This is the command line tool to run system updates, so theoretically would freeze based on your report. If you are lucky it might give some more detail as to what exactly is broken. Otherwise, yes, I think a clean install is the best way to try and resolve this. My guess is that if you aren’t actually using a supported Mac, as you seem to say, though, that is in fact your problem. Apple’s software update software may be freezing because the software update server is not responding to an unsupported Mac. At least, being unsupported there’d be no reason that Software Update works on such Macs, so you may just be stuck.
 

kschendel

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 9, 2014
1,274
548
Other people have installed HS successfully and run App Store on an iMac9,1 (see the Unsupported Macs thread), so I don't think it's a generic restriction on that particular Mac.
 

kschendel

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 9, 2014
1,274
548
In case anyone else has this issue, the cure turned out to be a clean install instead of an upgrade install.

I'm pretty sure the computer had been upgraded to El Cap, and maybe upgraded to Mavericks before that, so there must have been some sort of old crud left over that was interfering with softwareupdated. Whatever it was, the clean install (and migration assistant apps and files restore from backup) fixed it.
 
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