spinning wheel trying to log on any user - help please!

[Apsleymacuser]

whenever I try to log on to any of the users on my iMac, all I get is the spinning wheel which continues and doesn't allow me to log on. A couple of days ago my wife was looking for colouring in for our children and a warning message came up with a yellow triangle. Neither of us can remember the message but it had the word 'porn' in it. The only option was to click ok which we did and then turned the computer off. Since then we have not been able to log in. I've tried starting in safe mode with no joy. The disk utility said that the hard drive was ok. Can anyone help?!

 

[RadDave]

Hello and welcome to the forum - I do not have an immediate answer for you at the moment but please provide answers to the following: 1) What Mac do you own (i.e. model/year); 2) What OS X is installed; and 3) Do you have a backup (e.g. Time Machine and/or a cloned bootable one)? Will greatly help responders to provide more specific advice - good luck. Dave

 

[johnodd4]

Ok I Can answer this and it isn't good.

First don't search coloring for children you will find yourself flooded with bogus e-mail scams and even plugin's that download porn and pedofile stuff as well you need to restart your machine all over again in order to get rid of the porn app malware you have to format the drive.

do not backup data if you do the data will just transfer the porn app to the fresh installation.

I recently had this happen to a customers iMac where it wouldn't let him log on at all i connected the hard drive to a external drive box and all that was in applications and startup was 90 copy's of porn.app.

Be glad you cut it off before it started downloading.

 

[Apsleymacuser]

Thanks Dave, new to this - not much idea!

In answer to your questions:
1) it's a 2011 iMac. I'm not sure of the model I'm afraid, it's got 250GB hard drive if that helps.
2) it's got OS X maverick
3) not backed up! I realise that is a schoolboy error!

Thanks,

 

[cradom]

How much free space is on the drive?

 

[Apsleymacuser]

Hi Cradom,

Apparently there is 168 GB left on the hard drive

On the OS X base system it says there is 31.7MB of 1.29GB available.

Thanks

 

[cradom]

Base system? What exactly are you looking at? I hope that's not memory.
If so, That's your problem.

 

[Apsleymacuser]

I'm not sure what 'base system' is - I booted up in disk utility and it was one of the options to click on for info on the computer.

If it is memory, how would i fix it? Can I?

Thanks

 

[bobtomay]

It is not memory. That is part of the Recovery HD in a sense.

When you go into recovery mode it expands and mounts the "BaseSystem.dmg" and calls that volume the "Mac OS X Base System". You will only see this while booted into recovery mode. That is the volume that is running while in recovery.

I'm hesitant to offer any suggestions with no backup and not knowing whether or not you have stuff on there that you cannot afford to lose...

If it were mine, I would likely just reinstall the OS via recovery. This should only install the OS over the top of what you have without affecting the user accounts or data on the machine. Do not erase, format, partition, etc. You are only installing to the existing Macintosh HD partition. I would run a repair permissions and a verify drive first.

You could also, install OS X to an external drive, boot to that external, move the stuff you need from the internal drive to the external - then totally wipe the internal and start over with it. You've got a few hours work ahead of you.

For both you and the wife - never click ok on a web browser pop up like that. When you run into one of those, you need to force quit the browser - turn off wifi or disconnect the ethernet cable - then start the browser and close the affected tab of the browser.

 

[Apsleymacuser]

Thanks very much bobtomay. I'll give that a try...