iMac keeps crashing after Catalina upgrade

Went to the apple store and after erasing my hard drive and reinstalling Mojave, I have no more problems!!

Erase and go down to 10.14.6 (Mojave) that is the only solution!

For what it's worth: disabling the AMD with gfxCardStatus makes my machine workable again. I haven't tried it yet with an external monitor. I'll check it out tomorrow and will report.

Got an iMac with similar issue. Kept on rebooting after installing Catalina. Seems to be fixed after unplugging external HD.

Try Safe boot. Press and hold Shift when you power on; release keys at Apple logo.

Now I forgot to turn off the external displays. After about an hour the Mac promptly crashed. So it looks like turning the external displays off does prevent this type of crash.

Some users found that Power Nap caused problems. Try unchecking it, reboot and see if the problem persists or not.

Update from me: I do have 2 27" 4k monitors plugged in and the issue only occurs with the monitors. Radeon Pro Vega driver makes sense. I do have the automatic graphics card switch still turned on so I'll test out the issue with just the Radeon Pro Vega card running without the Intel card.

I have spent the last 2 hours on the phone with Apple support. The new support member confirmed that they are getting new reports of this same issue. Some people reported fixes. They are assuming that my issue is fixed but they are about to get another phone call from me confirming that it's not. Next phone call they promised me that they will pass this onto the engineers if the issue still occurs.

Apple has already released a public notice that there are other bugs that has plagued Catalina but no confirmation of our issue. If you haven't called Apple on this issue yet, may I suggest that you do so. The more complaints the faster this can get resolved.

Yesterday I set 'Turn display off after' to 3 hrs and have not experienced this crash. I have one hot corner where I move the cursor to put display off. No other changes applied.

Keeping my fingers crossed again 😀

I have found a remarkably simple workaround for this problem. Like everyone else, my MacBook Pro crashes with eternal monitors after 1 -3 minutes of sitting idle. From what i have found, this is due to USB to HDMI (DVI, SVGA, etc) adapters and docking stations going to sleep or low power mode after a few minutes of static content. So, simply change the Desktop Background to change every minute so the adapters do not go to sleep. Trivial and simple, but so far seems to work on my system. Please note: you must set this to one minute on every monitor and not just your primary. System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver, Desktop (tab), change picture [every minute].

All the while I've been trying to prevent my machine from idling / sleeping and it's continued to panic every few minutes of inactivity. I've now just stumbled upon something weird and my machine hasn't rebooted in the last 20 hours! Set your Energy Saver settings like in the attached screenshot (let display turn off after 3 minutes of inactivity). I'm now aggressively causing my display to sleep and it seems to have stopped rebooting.

Just to confirm. If you remove all attached monitors (I am using 2) and repeat the above steps. No issues - just as before. Connect the monitors and repeat the steps. Crash. Note this is also happening with PathFinder 8.6 but less frequent and must be connected to network drive. Also with Pixelmator Pro 1.5.1 Avalon and VLC 3.0.8 Vetinari (all latest versions).

Problem multiplies when I am watching a movie on one monitor in VLC and working on another monitor in Pixelmator. I will probably record a video on the colorful effects tonight!!

TONS of replies here. I've been experiencing the same issues with crashing immediately after upgrading to Catalina. I'm on 10.15.1with upgrade taking place last night from the latest version of Mojave. I've had about 8 crashes since. I have 2 external 27" 4K monitors attached via Thunderbolt.

On a side note, I gotta say that Apple has been developing a trend over the past 3 years or so of releasing software that is very buggy and poorly implemented, in which these bugs linger for months and months with no fix or response. Because this isn't an imminent severe security risk to millions, I doubt this will be seriously looked at any time soon, so I guess we'll all just have to deal with it or downgrade to Mojave (which I will be doing today).

Make sure your

settings >> Power Saver >>

1. "Put Hard Disks to sleep when possible" is NOT checked
2. Turn display off after: set to "Never"
3. Enable Power Nap: checked

With those settings on all my macs crash way less (since chokalina of course)

I imagine after the 1 millionth reported issue of the same thing apple will privately address this bug in catilina with a hidden patch

You think that you've eliminated all 32-bit code from your computer, then you find 64-bit apps and drivers that use 32-bit code. Run Go64. Nuf Sed. Deep dive on the permissions solves some problems too.