Sean HeberMar 9

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 HeberMar 9

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 HeberMar 9

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 HeberMar 9
Sadly that didn’t fix it either.
Show threadSean HeberMar 9

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 HeberMar 9
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 HeberMar 9
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 threadSean HeberMar 9
I found a 4TB drive, wiped it, and am going to attempt to install Tahoe fresh to that external drive using recovery. Then assuming that works, I’ll see if I can read or capture the Data volume directly to at least get another copy of it. After that I’m not sure. Can migration assistant work? Could I maybe use that to migrate from my internal drive to my external one and see if that works? I don’t know. Used to be you could do all kinds of stuff but everything so fucking locked down anymore.
Show threadThomas Brand
@bigzaphod a 4TB SSD? You are rich!
Mar 9 at 5:12pmWeb
Show threadSean HeberMar 9
@Eggfreckles its not an ssd.
Show threadThomas BrandMar 9
@bigzaphod Running Tahoe on spinning rust makes baby Jesus cry.
Show threadSean HeberMar 9
@Eggfreckles I may or may not have lost my entire history so Im kinda not in the mood.
Show threadThomas BrandMar 9
@bigzaphod sorry. My suggestion would be to backup your data partition to the hard drive and thn reinstall to the SSD. You will probably have to do this anyway, and Tahoe performancew while running off a hard drive is dissapointing at best.