Big Sur OS upgrade flashing ?
Hi,
Back in March, I tried upgrading my OS to Big Sur from High Sierra. I ran into an issue where I had enough room for the installer to install and then initiate the Big Sur installation but then was stuck in a boot loop. After some investigation and help from a Mr. Macintosh video, I was able to discover that the installer did not give a pop-up indicating not enough storage was available for the entire OS installation, only enough was available for the installer. See the article here for more information:
https://mrmacintosh.com/big-sur-upgrade-not-enough-hd-space-serious-issue-possible-data-loss/
I borrowed a friend's MacBook with High Sierra and used the target disk mode to access my drives via a thunderbolt cable. I then deleted 36 GB of videos but also deleted my downloads folder which presumable contained the installer. When I tried to eject the first time I had an error. I then tried again and eventually the disk ejected. (Note I did not click force eject.) After this, I rebooted my MacBook and it was supposed to finish installing Big Sur. However, I was met with the image of a flashing folder with a question mark on it. I connected back to my friend's computer and this is what the Disk Utility was showing: “AppleAPFSMedia uninitialized” , and “Apple SSD SM0512G Media Thunderbolt External Physical Disk • GUID Partition Map” and under that, “disk2s2 Thunderbolt External APFS Physical Store.” I also booted into recovery mode and was showing the same thing.
Does anyone know how I can recover my data/install Big Sur without losing my data? Please help as I have years of photos and videos and never thought to back up my laptop. If you need any further information, please let me know. Thank you!
MacBook Pro 13″, 10.14
