iMac keeps crashing after Catalina upgrade

Well, the 10.15.2 public beta adventure was short lived. After 24 hours crash free, the ‘fun’ started all over again... when trying to send the crash report, the MacBook crashed again. I’m giving up. Mojave is installing as we speak.

I am having this same issue on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) I do not have any external monitors on it and dont know what graphics card i have but i know it has only been happening since catalina my apple care has run out but can i still call them up and complain the thing is it never seems to happen when im close to it it just pops up when i get back to it that it has restarted

That's something that I have also noticed . . . that the Kernel Panics seem to occur more often when we step away, i.e., when the computer is not active, and even when disconnected from the Internet (in my case, when I unplug the modem overnight).

Given the varying problems that cause a KP, though, from highlighting text, to multiple monitors, etc., I may be stating the obvious in saying that there will be no singular fix, due to the multiple issues being reported.

From what I've experienced, I believe that removal of 32-bit apps, removal of 3rd party kernel extensions (kextstat | grep -v com.apple), and the only Energy Saver setting checked/selected being "Prevent computer from sleeping . . .", are all helpful in reducing the number of KP's.

I believe the more input and feedback that others contribute to this thread, the quicker Apple engineers will find a solution(s).

Took me awhile to find this thread, most of the result that came up were issues with installing. sounds like there’s lots of issues with this new Catalina upgrade..

I am experiencing the exact issue like all of you are having. Seeing the same screens you guys are sharing. I Hope they find a fix soon. In the meantime, I’ve reverted back to Mojave.

Anyways, i am brand new to Mac - switched over cuz I was getting sick of BSOD, turns out there’s a thing called “reboot loop” here in the Mac world lol. Had to learn from scratch on how to reformat - Sad thing is, I don’t even know if I’m doing it properly..

All I know is, it took me awhile to learn how to go in to the right recovery mode. Then even longer on figuring out how to format the right drive, partition the formatted drive to the right format, install high sierra(it came with my iMac), download Mojave on App Store, and install/upgrade Mojave from High Sierra.

To Mac Pros out there..I hope I’m doing it right, please correct me if not. TIA

I'm not crashing as often, but I'm getting two other irritating issues.

After the machine has been running for hours after a restart, Preview decides it cannot open files. So it can't open PDFs, but Acrobat can certainly open the same file. Similarly, file copy/move stops working. I can drag and drop a file from one location to another, and immediately get the 'boing' as the copy supposedly completes, but the file doesn't move. I have to restart to get these to work again.

After a restart, things are a bit unstable and it takes a while for the MBP to get itself settled. But it seems to be less inclined to kernel panics at the moment. It happily ran a long job overnight inside Parallels (on Windows) and didn't skip a beat, as far as I can tell.

I do have the Power Nap turned on and manually put the MBP to sleep. It has been known to restart during this sleep.

One other thing that has happened twice. I will have the MBP asleep and will plug it in to the two external monitors, then open the lid to get things woken up. Normally, everything is fine and the monitors take a few seconds to get configured. But on these two occasions, the MBP's screen has remained off, but still the primary screen, i.e., that's where the log-in prompt is, but it's not showing. Unplugging the monitors to get the main screen on again, then plugging in the external monitors seems to work, but it's unusual behavior.

So it's getting better, but there appears to be a panoply of weird behavior! I'm not game to try a beta, as I'm getting used to this particular set of weirdness, but it's not like Mojave at all!

Good news, guys!

It seems 10.15.2 beta2 fixed halt-restart-unattended-with-external-monitor issue.

My Macbook Pro 2018 Vega20 with two external monitors just turned them off and gone happily sleep after 30 min unattended and woke up without any errors.

Before 10.15.2 beta2 is was always panic-halt-restart with report to developers.

You should try 10.15.2 public beta2, guys.

mithos99 wrote:

Good news, guys!

It seems 10.15.2 beta2 fixed halt-restart-unattended-with-external-monitor issue.

My Macbook Pro 2018 Vega20 with two external monitors just turned them off and gone happily sleep after 30 min unattended and woke up without any errors.

Before 10.15.2 beta2 is was always panic-halt-restart with report to developers.

You should try 10.15.2 public beta2, guys.

I hope this keeps working for you!

Not to pee on the fire, but maybe give it a couple of days before getting excited. More for your own sanity than anything else 😃.

What's been people's experience with getting support from Apple on this?

My 2017 iMac is still under AppleCare, but I haven't tried to call Apple yet or visit the "genius" bar, partially because I've been too busy the past two weeks, but largely because I cynically feel I'm going to get the run-around, without even a valid diagnosis of the problem, or an honest answer about Apple's knowledge of it.

[Edited by Moderator]

Interestingly when I restored Mojave I got the same crashes so maybe that's right. I'm back with Catalina and am getting one crash in two days on my iMac (2017). I can cope with that for now. It doesn't happen at all on my Mac Mini (2012) and on the iMac it never happens while I'm using it, only overnight or when I step away for a couple of hours. Setting the machine to sleep after three minutes and checking the bottom three boxes in power settings seems to offer me the most stable setup.

Ckren wrote:

ive been told it is 100% not Catalina issue and They have million of users using it with no issues.

so don’t expect any truthful help or explanation.

I mean depending on what issues you're showing them, that might be correct.

But for me, rolling back to Mojave fixes everything. So my problem is provably Catalina specific. 🤷🏽‍♂️

EDIT: If the issue isn't Catalina, then it's hardware or some other software on your system causing your trouble.

But yeah, don't expect anything useful from support: Apple Customer Service — Fail Different.

jaysun029 wrote:

There has to be a commonality here that we're missing. Obviously, the sleep mode variable is one, but within those "millions" of others with no issues, they have sleep mode enabled.

Well most people with the 'idle crash' seem to be reporting having one or more external monitors attached. The trouble with threads like these is everybody just piles on with their own misfortunes, no matter whether they resemble the original problem or not. So you end up with a big dumpster fire.

This is really a nightmare for every support team. Only a few users are affected, but nearly 1000 other clicked on "I have this question too", so "a few" is maybe not the right term. It appears that the error occurs on many different models without obvious similarities.

My MacBook Pro runs Catalina without any problems, my iMac keeps crashing whenever it wakes up from sleep mode. But without sleep mode the iMac runs without any problems. I really don't believe that this is a hardware problem. I would guess a low level kernel drive, but it's hard to prove.

I'll try to downgrade this weekend to Mojave.

Maybe I found a solution.

I've tried nearly everything - changed RAM, reset anything, boot from internal and external drives, switched WLAN on and off, but nothing helped. There was one last thing to try - and now I can go to sleep mode and wake up my iMac without any problem. Maybe it's a little early to give the green light here, but switching of Bluetooth did the trick.

It took some time to find an old USB keyboard and mouse, but now everything works fine. I keep watching the next days, but could you please try and give feedback? Good luck!

very much having the same issue, the computer has crashed 4 times this evening. I will try disconnecting external monitor, but I would agree that crashes seem exacerbated with multiple active desktop spaces. I will also try changing desktop background images to solid colors. Seems to have worsened after adding some custom images as background to desktops. Keep me in the loop if anyone has other ideas !

If turning BT off fixes your issue (even if partially) then you just need to rebuild/ repair Photos library and your Mac should be fine.

Here is why is this happening:

Most of your pictures were initially imported into Photos and its library built in macOS Mojave. The Photos library needs to be rebuilt so it won’t interfere with Bluetooth’s memory space - in other words the library needs to be rebuilt to be compatible in MacOS Catalina.

a. Quit Photos

b. Hold Option Command while double click on Photos icon

c. Chose Repair at the prompt to repair library

The library should be then compatible with macOS Catalina. Check back.