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.
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.
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).
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.
This plan to install Tahoe on the external drive is also not going to be quick because for some reason it’s saying it will take 4 hours and 27 minutes. And worse, it’s been saying that for at least 10 minutes now. I can’t tell if it’s doing anything at all. No indication of if it’s downloading… at what speed… how things are going.. Nothing.
I guess we aren’t supposed to know about anything at all anymore.
To make matters worse, I’m still a bit sick.
So yeah. This is awesome.
Down to 4 hours and 2 minutes.
This is ridiculous. My internet is not this slow. I don’t know why it’s this slow.
I thought maybe I’d go on my wife’s computer and figure out how to get the Tahoe installer downloaded and build the external bootable drive over there because maybe it’d download faster, etc.
Except I can’t find a Tahoe standalone installer.
I found some softwareupdate command line tool that is supposed to download it. So I tried that. It gives an error.
I search for the error and I find threads going back years about how it doesn’t work for people with the same error. No one knows why.
Awesome.
Good job, guys.
Time estimate suddenly dropped to 52 minutes. The progress bar is at 100%.
Fuck this. Time for lunch.
15 minutes later and it’s still at 52 minutes.
Neat.
About a minute remaining.
Sure Jan.
It still says theres about a minute remaining.
Can’t even tell if it’s doing *anything*.
Still about a minute remaining.
However in the Installer Log window I found there’s a progress visible that’s at 0.92011 time remaining: -1.
Good stuff.
It finished! And then it rebooted… progress bar went a little way up with the Apple logo. Sat there awhile. Then it rebooted again. So far not entirely unexpected…. Except…. It booted back into my normal system.
Wtf.
Tried logging in and nope - still hanging. No progress.
Rebooting holding power button to pick the external drive. Select it. Press the button. It does… nothing. Press it again. Nothing.
Go into Recovery mode, tried changing Startup Disk to the external drive and it says, “macOS needs to be reinstalled.”
WHAT?! I literally just did that on this drive!
So I go back to Recovery mode and tried the installer again and now the external drive is greyed out!?!
And it says, “This volume cannot be used since it has a secure token without any users.”
What the hell is going on here?
It appears I’m now too stupid and old to understand Apple’s bullshit.
Maybe I should switch to Linux.
So.. first... I spent many hours trying to copy my home folder, at least, after @keir told me about "Share Disk" in Recovery mode which kinda/sorta is a replacement for the old target disk mode. (Says a lot about the state of the web that while I was searching for what the hell to do I didn't once run across this mentioned anywhere.)
I hooked my computer up to my wife's computer and managed to mount the drive and started copying my home folder.
Until it stopped suddenly.
I got some unspecified error and the copy stopped. So I was like... wtf now...
But while I was copying the files I was doing more searching. And a comment from @dhpersonal mentioning how something similar happened to him at work and a tech reset file vault to fix it.
And so I went down a rabbit hole of how to decrypt my drive while in recovery mode and found this article https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/decrypting-an-apfs-encrypted-volume-using-diskutil-on-macos-10-13-2/ which had some commands to try (though clearly a very old article).
I managed to get it to decrypt.
It was a long shot, but since the copy failed I figured I didn't have much to lose at this point.
So I rebooted and crossed fingers.
And...... it sat at the Apple logo.... and froze.
This was different from before - before it was able to get to the login screen, at least.
Was pretty dismayed. Figured... welp... probably hardware?
Tried rebooting again. Progress bar got even less far than the last time.
So I start searching on my phone again for a bit. Then look up... progress bar moved?!
So I figured - actually - maybe it was still decrypting? I don't really know how any of this works - but the decrypt command only took like 5 seconds which didn't seem long enough. So I wasn't even really sure it truly worked.
But my guess here is it just does something to make it possible to decrypt and it does so over time slowly as you read files, maybe?
Or maybe it was doing a disk repair...
Or maybe both?
So anyway, I left it sit for a long time. Maybe half an hour.
It very very slowly moved the progress bar one pixel and a time until it suddenly landed me on the login screen.
Well... progress... but I was here earlier and this is when it froze hard for real.
So I held my breath and tried logging in....
.... and boom! Logged right in. No delay whatsoever. Like nothing happened. Back on my desktop.
Holy shit.
So, in short, I don't really know what happened here - but I think it had something to do with FileVault. Did the T2 chip somehow forget a key? Did a cosmic ray corrupt something?
I was able to unlock and read my files fine in recovery mode so... yeah, I dunno...
Well. It *did* stop on me while copying... but that could have been anything, tbh. Could have been some stupid permissions error. But I don't know for sure.
I never fully tried my actual Time Machine backup because it'd have wiped my machine first to start the process and I didn't want to risk losing my only potential copy before trying it. Which is why I was trying to get in and at least copy the important stuff before going the backup restore route.
I might have been able to restore it - just slowly. So I still don't really know for sure.
Setting up the drive I found as a *second* Time Machine backup.
So I'll have two now.
@bigzaphod I’m sure this sucked in ways unimaginable, but this playing out on Mastodon today was a super interesting bit of drama.
…what do you have for us tomorrow?😂
@bigzaphod Glad you're back up and running!
A suggestion: consider having a drive that you clone to — mine this morning (via Carbon Copy Cloner, from the 1TB internal to a 1TB SSD connected via USB-C) was a complete image and took only 42 minutes, and an incremental I did just now with the day's work took about 40 seconds.
Time Machine is great, but in a catastrophe I'd feel better with a clone. (that can even be made bootable)
@bigzaphod Interestingly, in checking out my current setup, I discovered that I don't, in fact, have FileVault enabled on my mini.
Which is weird, because I thought I did when I set it up? 🤷♂️ Now I have to decide whether — in light of your adventure — I want to turn it on.
@bigzaphod I think that built-in encryption is probably why I never explicitly turned it on, and why my muddled brain remembered it as being on.
I guess if someone managed to break in and steal it, and got signed in somehow… but then in that case, where the system thinks they have a valid login, FileVault would unlock anyway, so…🤷♂️
Agreed on the recovery story. Advanced data protection on icloud is both tempting for security but terrifying in the potential for loss.
@bigzaphod Well done. It sounds like File Vault introduced corruption to the system.
Which is bad. Should not happen but they obviously still have bugs. Make sure you always back up somewhere. This could happen again.
Maybe do a SuperDuper! backup now that you’re up and running. It’s bootable (at least on my macs which are all intel. Not sure about Apple silicon macs)
@bigzaphod This all sounds like an absolute saga, have been watching the updates all day.
I hope you're able to get it resolved.
@bigzaphod I long ago gave up trying to make sense of, or trusting, the estimated times given by, well, pretty much any Apple process: downloads, installs, whatever.
But it has definitely gotten worse.
It sucks that you're having to deal with this at all, let alone while still sick. Hope you're able to make some real progress soon.
@bigzaphod If it’s any consolation, there is one positive result:
Reminding me that a) I had several local code branches that had not been published and could be lost, so I took care of that; b) it's been *months* since I last ran a full clone of my mac — so I dug out that drive and am running one now.
@bigzaphod It just works*
*mileage may vary
@bigzaphod I feel your pain and am following along waiting for when you do finally figure it out. Sorry you are also sick during this stressful time.
Have you tried this? I have no idea if it will work, but you said you already tried the command line method, so I went looking for other options:
https://mrmacintosh.com/how-to-create-a-macos-tahoe-usb-boot-disk-installer-in-5-min/
@bigzaphod Fingers crossed you find a solution. No suggestions I’m afraid.
Ooh a thought, Apple Support?
Most of my critical data is either in iCloud or on my MAS.
If I have issues I back local data to the NAS flatten the Mac and then usually do o a manual rebuild. Takes me maybe 24 hours but I have a really great Mac for months. Then again I keep lists of what apps I have installed, backup configs etc where I can. Paranoid much. Nitten once, never again.
Keep us posted.
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