macOS Catalina 10.15.17 supplemental updated released 11/5/2020 bricked my 27" late 2013 iMac!

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Level 1

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macOS Catalina 10.15.17 supplemental updated released 11/5/2020 bricked my 27" late 2013 iMac!

After my iMac automatically updated 9 days ago I had a week of technology ****! first sign of trouble was seeing a black screen with a no entry sign. a shut down and start up felt like things are okay then infinite beachball spins started repeatedly. Then back to the black screen with the "do not enter" sign. A few disc repairs and no luck. a recovery and reinstall and it works for a day and then the updated installs again and back to square zero. A clean install of Catalina with formatted hard disk and still no luck. I did a Mojave clean install and the issue resolved. It eventually dawned on me that this is probably related to the supplemental update and another clean install of Catalina, turn off automatic update and no issues. Luckily I had everything backed up on a time capsule.

My 2016 power book pro took the updated no issues and now it is running Big Sur. Big Sur is not compatible with my 2013 iMac. So Catalina it is. How can I get apple to fix the supplemental updated so it doesn't brick my iMac again?

Posted on Nov 14, 2020 7:16 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

woodmeister50

Level 7

20,557 points

Nov 14, 2020 7:22 AM in response to omarmd75

FWIW, I had somewhat the same experience and and after restoring

to a point before the update with Time Machine, instead of doing

the supplemental update from the System Preferences update, I downloaded

the update from here and installed and all is fine:

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2060?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

BTW, I always leave auto updates off but still have notifications enabled

so I know there is an update and can install when convenient.

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Answer 2

omarmd75 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 14, 2020 7:25 AM in response to woodmeister50

Thank you for the speedy answer. In all honesty I am somewhat scared of going through the experience again!

However at the same time I don't want to continue a possibly vulnerable iMac. I will probably backup my iMac to a USB hard drive and try your way. It took 24 hours for my iMac to pull the data from my somewhat faraway time capsule!!!

thanks again.

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