Catalina software: Crash, Crash, Crash, Crash and more Crashing

Something interesting happened before the weekend. I reverted to Mojave and still had the crashing behavior even though Windows 10 under bootcamp did not.

I rebooted into Mojave and got an eficheck problem reported (don't know what it was), but was alerted to install a security update.

After that update, the machine no longer randomly crashes. I ran it all weekend and stressed the machine with CPU/GPU tests, but it looks good.

I ran the following command pipeline to see the Boot ROM and SMC versions to see what others have running to see if these components are the cause of this crash:

$ system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | grep -i "Version" | awk -F ':' '{print $1 $2}'
      Boot ROM Version 157.0.0.0.0
      SMC Version (system) 2.18f15

Don't give up yet!

Even brand new top-of-the-line mid-2019 15" MacBook Pros - preloaded with Mojave - have experienced the crashing nightmare once Catalina is loaded! The new 16" MBPro, however, comes pre-loaded with Catalina and works perfectly. My hypothesis is that OS 15 was designed around the specs and architecture of the 16" MB Pro. Perhaps if the folks at Apple working on Catalina fixes for the millions of prior machines try working from this premise, they may be more readily able to identify the issues plaguing millions of users.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) freezes randomly after upgrade to Catalina. No pattern of what causes it whatsoever. Just freezes and then shuts down. When press power on, it boots up and attempts to get where it had been in terms of opened applications. But work is lost of course. What to do???

Like others, I have reverted to Mojave with improved results. It cannot escape anyone’s notice that several of us have Mac’s with the same specs ( Late 2013, 16GB Ram, 500GB storage, etc), so unless this thread is specific to this spec’, notwithstanding Pike441’s observations, would seem that our spec’ of Mac is not compatible with the current Catalina. Apple must know this by now. The advisors I have spoken to are clearly working to a script. Whilst they have been fairly helpful, they are avoiding any comment - corporately. Many of them were extolling the virtues of Mojave, being only 1 yr old, whilst not exactly lauding Catalina. Like I am sure many of you, I have spent countless hours on this matter with mine that I will never get back!! One other thought , as it has clearly affected mine, is that low hard drive free space seems to have impacted the rate of crashing proportionaly. I was still getting the occasional crash after reverting to Mojave, until I freed up 20% more storage capacity.

I have the same problem and am utterly disappointed with Apple. I switched from Microsoft to Apple exactly for this type of reasons. The time lost rebooting and researching this is literally costing me thousands of dollars in lost productivity, especially at a time when I am overloaded with client projects.

To Apple leadership: Listen-up, if get control of this ship. You do NOT want to go down the path of “good-enough”. We have way more cost-effective options for “good-enough”, and Apple is not one of those options.

Fix this ASAP and do your due diligence before releasing updates and new software.

Thanks on sharing! Of course this is all happening in the middle of a ton of deadlines.. and I physically have no time to go through the pain of switching back to Mojave (which worked flawlessly).

I am thinking to switch to a Win laptop for a couple of weeks — but what are our expectations.? Will Apple really address the problem..? I get it that they won’t give any promises or timelines but are we supposed to wait and hope they will develop a patch.? Or get back to Mojave regardless of hopes?

cheers

I mentioned in my last post that after reverting to Mojave from Catalina, the crashes and shutdowns had pretty much stopped. Well sadly, that is no longer the case. I am getting pretty regular crashes, especially when scrolling in Music and PDFs (about the same in Adobe Reader or PDF Expert). Not sure if that hasn't crept up on me or I am just dealing with a few bigger (passworded) PDFs at the moment.

I am waiting for the Apple team to get back to me under the same case number. I suspect I will be expected to get the hardware checked out - that was there big push last time.

I would be interested if any of you that have also reverted are completely crash/shutdown free. Have any of you been given any "insider" views of the whole situation.

I am really struggling to get Time Machine to complete with all the crashes.

Very, very frustrated

My iMac seems to have stabilized. I freed up some disk space per another post I read somewhere, but that alone did little if anything. I also deleted all browser cached files and history, twice. That seemed to help a little. The last two steps I did seemed to resolve lingering issues - an SMC reset and then, to remove annoying and unproductive display issues, a NVRAM reset.

I cannot recall all the steps I took, but I did nothing major and followed the least intrusive suggestions in this and other threads, resigning myself to limp along until I decided to either buy a new Mac or go back to cheap Windows system.

I'm reserving a final sigh of relief until some time passes. I read too many posts where people reported back that their issues came back after a day or two. I did the SMC reset a day or two ago. The NVRAM I did today. So far, so good. My Mac is running the way it did prior to Catalina.

Said Tayar Segundo

macrumors newbie

Same here. I don't know if there is a corelation but last week, a few months after installing Catalina, Mac Mini started to restart unexpectedly. I could only solve by leaving only 1 of the 8GB sticks in either slot. The odd thing is that he does not accept both sticks (which are identical Kingston) at the same time but the slot seems to be indifferent

Apparently I was able to solve the problem using EtreCheckPro, which detected that the problem (Kernel Panics) was being caused by com.paragon-software.filesystems.ntfs (from a software that lets you read and write to NTFS disks). I believe that Paragon was not a 64bits app, as Catalina requires

To whom it may concern:

After more than 5 days without restarts by Kernel Panic, I can say that I was able to solve the problem.

EtreCheckPro detected that the problem was being caused by com.paragon-software.filesystems.ntfs (from a software that lets you read and write to NTFS disks).

No more restarts after uninstallation!

I believe that Paragon was not a 64bits app, as Catalina requires

From EtreCheckPro report:

2020-01-08 09:39:10 Kernel Panic (4 times)
        Details:
            panic(cpu 4 caller 0xffffff800de6520a): Kernel trap at 0xffffff7f8ee30
            473, type 14=page fault, registers:
        3rd party kernel extensions: 
            com.paragon-software.filesystems.ntfs

this thread has been marked as solved with an answer that is not actually the best one... you should consider to highlight the solution of reverting macbook pro 15 2013-2015 to mojave...

you should also can be interested in a method to deactivate thunderbold for ethernet connections, that you can do by renaming the file AppleThunderboltNHI.kext

this thunderbolt method was working for 2 months until i just did the last upgrading to 10.15.3....

everything points to a problem of compatibility between macbook pro 2013-2015 and catalina os and that should be recognized by apple in order to help people like me who can only afford to buy old macbooks... when a machine is not anymore adapted to the last os upgrade, that also change its price on backmarket !!!!

Same here. Thank god my other Mac (my work machine) isn’t running Crapalina, ‘cause the other is unusable.

Are there any kernel panic logs in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports?

If so, post one using the additional text button in the toolbar here.