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Macbook Pro 2019 keeps crashing after formatting Time Machine drive with APFS

I upgraded my  Macbook Pro 2019 i5 to Big Sur a few weeks ago (and now running 11.1) and it has been running fine apart from Time Machine backups on my external hard drive. When running Catalina I had my Time Machine drive formated with mac OS Extended.  This morning I reformatted the external drive and chose APFS, and my Mac has crashed a few times already. Hardware is working but it's a "black screen" crash. The screen turns black and then a white text comes on the screen prompting me to press a key or wait. The machine then starts and everything looks fine  Since I haven't had that problem before I suspect it's the combination of Time Machine and the  AFPS formatted drive (WD My Passport SSD), which might cause the error. I've disconnected the drive to see if the computer is stable, and it seems it is as long as the external drive isn't connected and Time Machine starts to make a backup. No crash report is generated, and I've tried to search the net to no avail. Would be very interesting to see if someone has any ideas.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Dec 29, 2020 6:28 AM

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Posted on Jan 3, 2021 9:58 AM

You are having kernel panics, but what you posted was not a panic log, so is of absolutely no use except to the person at Apple that wrote the code that crashed.


There's not much to find in a panic log. Primarily I'm looking for third-party kernel extensions loaded when the panic occurred. The two predominate causes of a kernel panic are third-party kernel extensions and hardware faults. Sometimes, the particular hardware might be hinted at in the log, but for the most part you can't determine absolute cause from the panic log.

If there are third-party kernel extensions loaded at the time of the panic, you would uninstall them and see whether the panics stop.


EtreCheck will tell you if you have kernel extensions installed, but not whether they were loaded at the time of the panic.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 3, 2021 9:58 AM in response to Erik Holm

You are having kernel panics, but what you posted was not a panic log, so is of absolutely no use except to the person at Apple that wrote the code that crashed.


There's not much to find in a panic log. Primarily I'm looking for third-party kernel extensions loaded when the panic occurred. The two predominate causes of a kernel panic are third-party kernel extensions and hardware faults. Sometimes, the particular hardware might be hinted at in the log, but for the most part you can't determine absolute cause from the panic log.

If there are third-party kernel extensions loaded at the time of the panic, you would uninstall them and see whether the panics stop.


EtreCheck will tell you if you have kernel extensions installed, but not whether they were loaded at the time of the panic.

Macbook Pro 2019 keeps crashing after formatting Time Machine drive with APFS

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