iMac with macOS High Sierra getting stuck while Booting.

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iMac with macOS High Sierra getting stuck while Booting.

On a mid 2010 27" iMac running High Sierra, I did a hard reboot after Finder seemed to become unresponsive after connecting an iPhone. After the progress bar, it showed a black screen with a visible cursor instead of loading Mac OS like usual. The Windows partition on the same SSD loads correctly, as does an external SSD also running 10.13.6. It will even boot up an older 1TB hard drive with Snow Leopard. Attempting to boot in Safe Mode froze after typing in the password.

I've performed a disk check in recovery mode and from the external hard drive and it shows no errors. I can access the drive itself from booting from the external drive. I've reset the SMC and NVRAM and now it will stop at the progress bar when it reaches about 80-90%. Booting in Verbose mode show no errors, and switches back to the progress bar and stops.

I've also attempted reinstalling Mac OS from an external drive, which installs Mac OS and then freezes at the progress bar after it reboots. Is there anything else I can try short of backing up the SSD and removing the non-booting partition and doing a fresh install? (Could that even cause more issues?) Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Running diskutil list from the external drive:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Old Metal Macintosh HD 999.9 GB disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk1

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_APFS Container disk2 399.0 GB disk1s2

3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 100.9 GB disk1s3

/dev/disk2 (synthesized):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: APFS Container Scheme - +399.0 GB disk2

Physical Store disk1s2

1: APFS Volume Barry's SSD Drive 297.5 GB disk2s1

2: APFS Volume Preboot 21.5 MB disk2s2

3: APFS Volume Recovery 516.2 MB disk2s3

4: APFS Volume VM 20.5 KB disk2s4

/dev/disk4 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *512.1 GB disk4

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk4s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 511.3 GB disk4s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk4s3

[Re-Titled By Moderator]

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Mar 21, 2024 9:11 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

HWTech

Level 9

56,234 points

Mar 22, 2024 6:49 PM in response to Porton

First, make sure to disconnect any unnecessary items from the iMac (especially the iPhone and its cable) in case one of them is causing a problem with macOS.

You can check the health of the boot drive by running GSmartControl from within Windows. There is a portable version of the GSmartControl app which can be run from the Downloads folder so no installation is required (there is a version which will install as well). Post the complete GSmartControl text health report here so I can examine it.

When running First Aid, you should run First Aid on the hidden Container. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the hidden Container appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Even if First Aid says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll back through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If so, then run First Aid again until they are gone, otherwise you will need to run First Aid while booted into Recovery Mode, otherwise you will need to erase the drive followed by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup.

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Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

56,234 points

Mar 23, 2024 7:06 PM in response to Porton

It looks like you need to update the drive database file since there are so many "unknown" attributes so their values are suspect, plus we don't know what those values represent. I downloaded the app to see if I could see what version of the core utility was, but that information is not available since I don't have a Windows system, however, it looks like the date of those files is from 2020 so the database file is out of date. Is there an option within GSmartControl to update the drive database list? If not, you should be able to run the "update-smart-drivedb.exe" file assuming it is able to do so with the portable version since the file is located in the extracted GSmartControl folder (there is a way to manually replace the database file once we determine the major version of the smartutil utility).

Usually the "warnings" in First Aid can usually be ignored, they seem to be more for the First Aid developers than it is for the end user. "errors are what are critical. By default First Aid does not repair "overallocation" issues...who knows why, but it may be due to it being a risky repair.

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Answer 3

Porton Author

Level 1

14 points

May 15, 2024 7:16 AM in response to HWTech

Just wanted to follow up on this situation. After your previous advice, I made sure GSmart Control was fully updated, and even ran the Mac OS version. It returned the same log as before, so in the end I just cloned the Mac partition, fully erased it from the SSD and did a clean install (which refused to work before) and restored from the cloned drive. This fixed the issue and the Windows partition was unaffected. I did have to use my recovery drive to do this since I was getting an error connecting to the update server.

It's a shame I couldn't find out what went wrong but at least it's working again. I just wanted to let others know in case anyone else has this problem, and thank you very much for all of your help, I certainly learned some things.

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Answer 4

Porton Author

Level 1

14 points

Mar 23, 2024 3:56 PM in response to HWTech

Thank you for the response. After doing the First Aid on the Container (in Recovery Mode), it passes through fine but at the section Verifying allocated space I received "warning: overallocation detected on Main Device (1793440+1) bitmap address (71e1) but it never seems to fix it.

I also ran the GSmartControl test, hopefully it's fine since it's a relatively new SSD after the original drive failed.

GSmartControl log

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

240,071 points

May 15, 2024 12:59 PM in response to Porton

👍

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iMac with macOS High Sierra getting stuck while Booting.

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