Security Update 2019-004 10.13.6 again?

The first one was withdrawn. See the following from Apple-Mac-OS X News, Tips and Tech Articles - xlr8yourmac.com.

Apple reissues Security Update 2019-004 for macOS 10.13.6 and 10.12.6

Apple has posted a (hopefully fixed) reissue of Security Update 2019-004 for macOS 10.13.6 and 10.12.6. I've restored the download page links for them in the July 22nd OS updates page. (The download pages are now dated July 29th, but I think they should have named them -004 v1.1 or v2.)

To save you a click, here's the download pages:

• Download Security Update 2019-004 (High Sierra) (1.9 GB) 
• Download Security Update 2019-004 (Sierra) (927.7 MB)

(This update will be a later macOS build number, which means users of Nvidia's web graphics drivers will need another driver update for any user that installs it. I've now updated the page of Mac Nvidia driver updateswith new downloads for the July 29th release Security Update 2019-004 builds.)

For anyone wanting to check for feedback before installing, here's links to Apple's forums for High Sierra and Sierra. (I saw some early reports that the revised update fixed problems seen with the original release. I saw one post from a 2012 Mac Pro owner that said the new update caused boot problems, which made me wonder if he had an Nvidia card with the previous drivers installed.)

Update problem from RAID boot drive

I had a report of problems (hangs at install restart) with this update from a user booting from RAID. Not able to ask him directly, but if possible - try the update run from a non-RAID drive. (Good to have a clone of your boot drive as well as a backup.) Not sure it applies to this update, but firmware updates won't work from a RAID boot drive. (Also some have had problems with firmware updates if not run from the onboard drive controller.)

 If you're not able to use a non-RAID drive, try the update run from a safe boot. Also see if there's any useful info in the logs and if there's any 3rd party drivers or extensions that might be a factor.

 After seeing several reports from T1/T2 chip Macs that had problems with the original update saying even an erase and reinstall from a Time Machine backup didn't fix the kernel panics made me wonder if there was a chip firmware update included. (Two of them said an upgrade to Mojave solved the wake from sleep kernel panics, and the Mojave upgrade included a firmware update.) 

I very recently purchased a refurbished mid 2011 mac mini which was running high sierra 10.3.6 sans affected security update. All was well. I downloaded the (now known to be buggy) security update and restarted to install. It did NOT install.

What it DID do was totally brick my brand new (that is, brand new to me) refurbished mac mini! I figured after four hours of staring at the splash install screen—which did change colors quite a few times back and forth between the white background w/ grey Apple logo and the sleek-looking black background w/ White Apple logo—it was time to throw in the towel. Once it had reached about 75% in status bar (about 3 and 1/2 hrs. earlier), it never budged!

I performed hard reset/power off by holding down power button, gave it a rest for about an hour, unplugged, disconnected peripherals and powered back on...and it picked up right where it left off at 75% and then just did absolutely nothing again (other than change colors as described above)! I gave it about another two hours to do its thing and then repeated hard reset/power off.

Safe Mode? No go! It didn’t work. I was able to start to Mac OS Recovery though, so that was good. I ran disk utility/first aid on hard drive and got the proverbial thumbs up! Restarted from Recovery and got the same thing as before.

I also tried using terminal in Mac OS Recovery. The first strange I noticed was that my user profile before prompt wasn’t there; in its place was a generic ‘Bash’ followed by a number. When I tried to restart in safe mode using the command line using ‘sudo’ (and the command to restart in safe mode) I got something like: ‘Sudo is not a valid command’ or something really crazy like that. I tried a few more times and gave up. I figured that the security install fail really screwed things up, and that my best bet was to simply reinstall mac os through recovery after using disk utility to wipe the hard drive (clean install all in recovery mode). Thankfully it worked! I am not brave enough yet to attempt to install the ‘fixed’ security update.