Catalina installation damaged EFI firmware on MBP mid 2012

Careful, as far as i know, the new chip would need to be programmed accordingly in order to function correctly. That process is not one I am familiar with, but figured I would give you a heads up about it. The solderless chip might be a safer bet.

I found this on dedicated German Mac magazine website. At least this problem starts to get traction and wider publicity - https://www.macwelt.de/news/Neue-EFI-als-Ursache-Defekte-Macs-nach-Update-auf-macOS-Catalina-10684104.html (you can use G translate to get the sense but it is exactly what the issue with Catalina is). Hope this will eventually be noticed and addressed by Apple.

I wrote several magazines, like heise.de or Golem.de, but they said that the story was still too thin because the number of people affected was still too small to justify an article about it.

Maybe it brings something if you, from the English-speaking area, announce yourselves there! Write to Thomas Kaltschmidt, thk@heise.de, and Oliver Nickel, on@golem.de, maybe we'll make a difference!

I wrote to Tim and Craig, but I don't know if the address was o.k., at least she didn't return it as undeliverable, I also described my problem to the customer service and gave my contact details, I don't know what else I could do.

By the way, my Mac will be ready by Friday and costs about 670€ for the logicboard.

Apple, stand by your mistakes!

I wrote to 9to5Mac.com yesterday and just got an email about the suggested topic/article.

As I said in a previous post: please also write to the heise.de and golem.de addresses I provided.

Maybe we are not completely alone.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/24/efi-firmware/

My Macbook pro 13" (mid 2012 upgraded with Samsung Pro 840 SSD) didn't complete Catalina supplemental update for a couple weeks ago. Stuck with ?-catalog on boot-up. Managed after a lot of retries and effort to install a new system of Catalina on the old standard HDD, not the SSD, and it works till this moment. Might help someone? Will try the tip with Catalina on USB that someone suggested on the SSD. Don't want to be stuck on the 5400rpm drive. Sounds to me as a EFI error to related to SSD:s.

Gee this happen to me in 2013. I had an early 2008 MacBook Pro 15”. I had Snow Leopard on it and it worked perfectly. I decided to upgrade to Mavericks and it destroyed my laptop. I started getting shut downs and kernel panic attacks. I took to the Apple store and they hardware diagnostics on it and said that I needed a new Motherboard/Logic-board. I indicated my displeasure because my MBPro was working fine until I upgraded. I had to pay about $300 for a repair by Apple.

Hello folks, I'm addressing users with Macs built 2015 or older and especially those with an iMac and the "white screen" problem.

Since, I think, it was macOS 10.12 or higher, only the internal drive was displayed by default when booting with ALT. If you wanted you could activate the Startup Manager by using additional keys or permanently by using a terminal command. See also https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202796 - Check for Option ROM Firmware.

Why do I write this? I picked up my repaired iMac today. Everything was fine, and I wanted to do a clean install using an usb-stick when I noticed that by default only the internal drive was displayed. It occurred to me that this terminal command exists and all available drives are displayed in the Startup Manager.

And now guess what happened... correct: after the restart my iMac showed me the familiar white screen again and reacted to nothing. This was confirmed to me again by the technician.

Now I'd like to know if this is just a coincidence or if you've used this terminal command before, which could have been years ago.

Maybe I found the trigger unintentionally, at least with the iMacs? What about the Macbooks? Did you also activate the permanent Startup Manager?

Fred

@jaygrow my experience with this issue was Apple staff would try to be nice. But firmly tell you they don’t believe that software can damage hardware(********) If it could, cupertino would have told them. But They won’t report to Cupertino. And all autopsy says death is deal to hardware not Catalina installation.

i ask you all:

how would Apple ever even be aware of this issue?

just post your support case number here. They don’t believe our words in the discussion group and this would probably be deleted

I just spent hours on the phone with Apple support. The issue seems to be how the hard drive is formatted. Every operating system before Catalina had most hard drives formatted as Extended Journaled. Well come to find our that Catalina will not run on that type of formatting. It will only operate on APFS formatting. The only option I was able to do was to reformat my drive to APFS. The good part was that I have a continuous backup of my system since everything is stored in iCloud. I even tried to go back to other operating systems but none of them would recognize my hard drive. So at this point I am currently restoring my drive in APFS and installing Catalina. Hope this helps.

Jim

Well, let me tell you that I have the exact same problem ad well a many other people that I Know and on the internet as well. CATALINA upgrade is bricking a lot of devices by ruining the EFI.

If it's your EFI, for sure -- I can fix that. Let me know if you need help ... my contact is this username of google's mail. Happy to help (I'm in LA) ...

I just chatted with Apple support online and they were aware of the EFI problem but were unaware to confirm when a fix would be available.

Exactly the same thing happened to my Mac mini 2012 and even posted it here - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250743718 Is there any user available method to fix EFI properly? This should be fixed by Apple to be honest as this is obviously faulty upgrade process of their official system....however warranty is long gone for my computer.