Sean Heber6d ago

Well this isn’t good. I can’t seem to login to my computer this morning. It reboots fine. I get to the login screen, but when I put in my password the progress bar moves ahead a few pixels and then just stops. The computer freezes solid. So solid there’s no mouse, caps lock doesn’t toggle, and the time stops updating.

Tried safe mode which didn’t work either.

Show threadSean Heber6d ago

Well, I don’t really know what to do. If I knew more about the internals I could probably fix whatever is wrong in recovery mode Terminal, but I kinda don’t.

I can get in Recovery Mode just fine. I ran Disk Utilities repair stuff on all the volumes. There were warnings about things not being the expected size. I ran it again, they were all gone.

Reboot - same effect.

Show threadSean Heber6d ago

I have a second user account on this machine that was setup for testing so its the most basic user account (not startup things) and it does the exact same thing - gets maybe 1/10th of the way on the progress bar and the whole entire computer locks up.

In Recovery Mode Terminal I got a list of APFS snapshots on my Data volume and there were a lot. So I painstakingly deleted every one of them using terminal commands (couldn’t get the tmutil to work - it complained about frameworks and dylibs).

Show threadSean Heber6d ago
Sadly that didn’t fix it either.
Show threadSean Heber6d ago

Well I have no idea what to do.

If I try to reinstall Tahoe, it has me unlock my drive and then it says, “The volume cannot be downgraded.”

So it won’t even let me do that.

Show threadSean Heber6d ago
My Time Machine backup was a networked one. It does talk to the server and find snapshots, but takes like 10 minutes just to do that. I tried plugging the drive in directly but it won’t see the snapshots that way. So to even *try* a recovery that way is apparently going to be an over-network recovery which given it’s like 1TB and this damn slow will take… ooh… the rest of the week maybe. And I don’t even know if it’ll work.
Show threadSean Heber6d ago
And the moment I commit to that option, it’s going to wipe my drive. So if it doesn’t work I’m fucked.
Show threadDavid Nelson6d ago
@bigzaphod It’s been a while since I had to do any of this so it may be different on Apple Silicon… but I wonder if you could restore your Time Machine backup to a bootable external drive. That way you at least get confirmation that it works before you blow away your actual computer.
Show threadDavid Nelson6d ago
@bigzaphod Or, if you have another Mac in the house with enough free space, run Migration Assitant against the Time Machine drive to pull your user account and data over to that computer.
Show threadSean Heber
@dmnelson hmm that might work. Still gonna take a week at these network drive speeds……. But…. I’d much rather make sure it works before wiping the potentially only copy.
Mar 9 at 4:46pmMastodon for iOS
Show threadMonty Hayter 🇨🇦6d ago

@bigzaphod @dmnelson I was going to suggest the same thing -- that can chug away while you continue to work on other methods of resurrecting your primary.

Pity the MBP's aren't exactly cheap, be a good excuse to buy a new machine.