Dave NanianJun 3

So, I had a kernel panic recently, and on restart, it would get to the "Unlock Disk" screen (first password prompt on a FileVaulted system), progress about 1/16th of the way, get stuck there for a while, and watchdog reboot.

Tried that a few times with no progress, so into Recovery.

Trying to repair with Disk Utility in Recovery got to the "unlocking disk" point, put up an indeterminate progress bar and a spinner, and looked like it was doing nothing.

This is already one step further than a "normal" user would go. On a plain kernel panic. Bad.

Worried that the encryption was corrupt, I force powered down (nothing was repaired), back into Recovery, then Terminal, then used diskutil to unlock without mount...no problem. Phew.

Next - tried to repair, but you can't, beacause *part* of the volume (system) is mounted. Have to force unmount the drive (disk3), then repair that.

Which is happening, and in progress. But how are "normals" supposed to deal with this?

Truly terrible UX.

Show threadDave NanianJun 3

OK, and now after a full OS reinstall, it rebooted a bunch of times, including one obvious watchdog boot near the end.

And, now, we're back exactly where we were, at the drive unlock pseudo-login, 1/16th of the way in with a progress bar, and about to watchdog-boot again.

macOS is great when it works, which is most of the time. The APIs are similar: great when they work, most o fthe time.

But Apple has a tendency to create black boxes—don't worry about how this stuff does what it does, it just works!—that, when they don't work, are just mysterious, time-sucking failures...either when you're a developer, or, in this case, a user just trying to get his Mac to boot after a kernel panic he did not cause.

It's absurd...and will clearly be an entire, wasted day.

Show threadSebastian Hagedorn 
@dnanian I've never tried it, but perhaps a recovery diagnostics file might shed light on things?
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-mac-apple-silicon-mchl82829c17/mac
Use macOS Recovery on a Mac with Apple silicon

Learn how to use macOS Recovery on a Mac with Apple silicon.

Apple Support
Jun 3 at 5:54pmWeb
Show threadDave NanianJun 3
@hagedose68 Hm. I'll see there's anything there after this very slow target disk transfer finishes.
Show threadDave NanianJun 3
@hagedose68 Alas, nothing at all useful there.