When force quit doesn’t work
What do you do when force quit doesn’t work and the computer is frozen?
iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.13
Question marked as
Top-ranking reply
Reboot. And if reboot cannot be accessed, then pressing the power button for about 10 to 20 seconds until the Mac powers off. Then you can press the power button again and boot. NOTE: this is not the best way to get the Mac's attention, but sometimes it is the only way.
When Forced Quit does not work, that means the process has made an operating system call, and the call has not returned. That is to say, it is stuck in the operating system kernel.
A Forced Quit, sets a flag so that when the process returns from the kernel the flag will be checked and if set, the process will vector to exit code instead of returning to where it made the operating system call. But first it has to return from whatever operating system call it made to get to that switch from kernel code to user code.