Black screen with cursor & black touchbar

Question

I have rebooted by MacBook Pro 2018 (with macOS Mojave installed). Everything went well: I was prompted for my account password and then the system started loading. Here start the bad things: control strip on the touchbar appeared and disappeared within a second, then I got a black screen with the arrow cursor on (NOTE during a few reboots I performed, I got to even see my wallpaper and the cursor). The touchbar has nothing on it (literally), the keyboard is still lit.

I've read a lot of things on line so here are the things I tried (without any luck):

1. Reset the SMC
2. Reset NVRAM
3. Boot into Recovery Mode:
   • run the First Aid from Disk Utility - no problems
   • reinstalled macOS Mojave (not a clean install, obviously); installation was successful but I still got the black screen
4. Boot into Safe Mode (here things start to get crazy - I explain below)
5. Boot into Single User Mode
6. I tried that thing found online with: when the screen is black, enter your password again and everything works miraculously - no luck

Safe Mode Boot

In the Safe Mode boot, I managed to get into the OS and even backup a few things to my iCloud drive. However the Touchbar was not displaying any of the system's control strip (no Escape, no brightness or volume controls on the right; when pressing Fn, the touchbar turns black), but application's touchbar buttons were there! (Google Chrome had its buttons, Finder as well etc.)

Single User Mode

I got to see the verbose boot output (really fast) but I was not taken to a Terminal; the OS asked for my account password in the graphical interface then got to the same black screen.

What can I do?

Answer 1

i was facing the same issue, added the root cause of my problem was system overload due to an application launching with every boot - for me the issue resolved with having to wait for about 30 minutes after black screen appears and letting the CPU takes it's time to load - then exiting the application.