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OS became corrupted

I have a MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports) that the OS became corrupted (on which OS Catalina was installed). When booting in recovery mode, it would try to install an older OS, which would fail because it could not install on an APFS formatted drive. I can boot from an external drive, but I cannot backup or copy the files from the internal drive. Working with audio on the internal drive, files are not able to playback files without gaps, which I suspect is related to the system corruption. I downloaded the OS Big Sur installer, it won't install on the internal drive, reporting "received XPC error Connection interrupted". As I need some files that are on that drive, I really don;'t want to erase it. I appreciate any help, thanks!


Posted on Dec 8, 2020 6:02 PM

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Posted on Dec 9, 2020 5:58 PM

artstype wrote:

I am attempting to backup with Time Machine. I have always used CCC for backups before, so I am not certain that it is backing up the internal drive (as I obviously have booted from an external drive). From what I’ve read, one must specifically exclude things, as the default is to backup all volumes. It would be great to know if I understand this correctly. In the meantime, I will also clone the drive when TM is done.

I've never used TM so I don't know the particulars.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 9, 2020 5:58 PM in response to artstype

artstype wrote:

I am attempting to backup with Time Machine. I have always used CCC for backups before, so I am not certain that it is backing up the internal drive (as I obviously have booted from an external drive). From what I’ve read, one must specifically exclude things, as the default is to backup all volumes. It would be great to know if I understand this correctly. In the meantime, I will also clone the drive when TM is done.

I've never used TM so I don't know the particulars.

Dec 8, 2020 8:34 PM in response to artstype

Instead of trying to install Big Sur use the Big Sur installer to run Disk Utility First Aid on the SSD. In fact I recommend running First Aid on the Container. To select the Container you must first click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive and Container appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. Even if First Aid shows everything is "Ok" click on "Show Details" to see if there are any unfixed errors. If there are unfixed errors this will require erasing the drive and restoring from a backup or clone.


If First Aid is unable to repair the volume, then install macOS from Internet Recovery Mode to an external USB drive. Even if this installs macOS 10.12 to the external drive you should then be able to access the files on the APFS volume since 10.12.6 can mount APFS volumes although you need to access the Catalina "Users" folder from the "Macintosh HD - Data" volume where the actual Catalina user accounts are stored. If you have trouble with maOS 10.12 accessing the data, then at least you can then upgrade the external drive to Catalina. I would not attempt to install Big Sur until after you resolve these issues. I personally spent two days trying to install Big Sur (the failures only had cryptic error messages) and I've seen lots of other posts where users have had Big Sur issues. You may just be compounding the problem by upgrading to Big Sur.


Make sure to always have frequent & regular backups. FYI, it is impossible to recover accidentally deleted data from an SSD plus an SSD can fail at any time without any warning signs.


See if your laptop qualifies for this free Apple SSD repair program:

https://support.apple.com/13-inch-macbook-pro-solid-state-drive-service


FYI, here is the current list of the publicly acknowledged free repair programs for various Apple products (some products such as your laptop have multiple programs available):

https://support.apple.com/service-programs

Dec 9, 2020 6:06 AM in response to HWTech

Thanks so much for all of this info, I really appreciate it.


I have run disk utility from both the recovery mode and from external drive, with no success. I got the following error messages:


Couldn’t unmount

check APFS Volume superblock

warning: APFS sb atapfs_fs_index (4) has unrecognized features (10)

Checking object map.

error: (PID 0x150d29) om:bon:dev_read(1379625, 1): Device error

Object map is invalid

The volume could not be verified completely


Unfortunately, DiskWarrior does not work on APFS. It seems to me that these kinds of errors are what Dw used to specialize in, but by optimizing the file system to increase speed available with SDs and the OS, this sort of failure becomes possible. But what do I know...

Dec 9, 2020 10:17 AM in response to artstype

You will need to backup or clone the SSD, then erase the drive so you create a new clean file system. Then restore from the backup or clone.


Disk Warrior is a great app for repairing the HFS+ file system, but unfortunately Apple has not released the necessary APFS documentation so that third party utilities can repair an APFS file system. It is a shame that Apple cannot design First Aid so that it can actually fix file system issues.

Dec 9, 2020 1:59 PM in response to artstype

Well, here’s what happened today:


booted from Install OS Catalina USB

Ran Disk Utility on Container disk1, which hung with whirling ball for 40 minutes.

Restarted, tempted to install Catalina, which failed with 2 minutes remaining in the install. This is what has happened all previous attempts.


I am attempting to backup with Time Machine. I have always used CCC for backups before, so I am not certain that it is backing up the internal drive (as I obviously have booted from an external drive). From what I’ve read, one must specifically exclude things, as the default is to backup all volumes. It would be great to know if I understand this correctly. In the meantime, I will also clone the drive when TM is done.




Dec 9, 2020 2:04 PM in response to artstype

“It is a shame that Apple cannot design First Aid so that it can actually fix file system issues.”


Amen. I can well imagine Hollywood is ******** bricks, as is every recording studio. Apple does lots of things so well, but this has always been a major fail. Alsoft says they won’t be able to deal with APFS. I hope this changes.

OS became corrupted

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