Random dark screen/shutdown on MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) after reinstalling Catalina

Unfortunately nothing I have done appears to have helped, this is the current status:

• Installed Catalina from a USB using Apple suggested procedure
• Updated to latest Security/Safari updates
• Signed into my iCloud account which syncs passwords and a bunch of other things including Photos - I am suspicious of cloudphotod so turned it off
• Turned off Spotlight

Essentially, within a short while of booting up the screen will go dark and then about 10 seconds later the machine will shutdown. No reports in Crash or Spin in Console.

EtreCheck report attached

The system log shows various failures and kill messages but it isn't clear that any of them illuminate the underlying cause. Unfortunately, additional text has a limit of 250k characters and the log is significantly longer. FWIW, I have attached an edited version with 100 lines before each boot (grep -B100 BOOT_TIME system.log > system-truncated.log)

Reinstalling Catalina, will NOT apply updates or log into iCloud this time to see if failure exhibits itself.

Anyone?

Thanks much.

Did run etreCheck and the only major issues it flagged were unsigned Java run time plugins which I deleted. I should mention that Apple hardware diagnostics reports no errors. The machine hung again while installing Security Update 2022-005 (10.15.7) and that rendered it unbootable even in safe mode. Sign! So rinse and repeat. Only installed Catalina and the two latest updates (the one above and Safari). Going to manually reinstall software and data. Already encountered one crash in SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager and this is all only Apple software, the faith is being tested! Crash log attached.

Etrecheck report attached, as mentioned in my pervious response this is after a fresh Catalina reinstall and updated so it doesn't include the spin lock failure. Will run Etrecheck again nd also post spin lock report if I encounter it (hopefully not!)

RESOLVED!

TL:DR

I followed the instructions at rmbp-crash to remove the Thunderbolt Ethernet driver and my MBP has now been stable for 24 hours. I can't use ethernet over thunderbolt but that's a small price to pay for an usable system.

Many thanks to Audit13 over at at macrumors.com for pointing me in the right direction.

Longer version if it will help anyone:

Unmodified 15' Mid-2014 with Retina display and GeForce GT 750M (MacbookPro11,3) that had been stable for 8 years started failing after an attempt to roll back from Big Sur to Catalina by reformatting the disk and restoring from a Time Machine USB disk. The failure would occur anywhere from a few seconds after power on to a couple of hours and followed a pattern reported by many others - the screen will go dark while the keyboard lights stay lit. In about 3 seconds the fans will start to rev up and at around 5 or 5 seconds the machine will power down. Pressing the power button brings the machine back up with no indication of failure.

Built in hardware diagnostics and extended hardware diagnostics run by the Apple store indicated no problems except for high cycles on the battery.

The problem occurred with standard Catalina/Big Sur/Maverick and no third-party software. in Maverick, the original OS the machine shipped with, the screen would freeze and require a hard power cycle to recover.

PRAM/SMC reset did not help.

The logs showed the following (from one of the Catalina installs):

log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' --last 24h

Filtering the log data using "composedMessage CONTAINS "Previous shutdown cause""

Skipping info and debug messages, pass --info and/or --debug to include.

Timestamp Thread Type Activity PID TTL

2022-08-06 16:12:42.684066-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128

2022-08-06 16:18:18.683751-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128

2022-08-06 16:40:13.743765-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128

2022-08-06 18:22:33.683862-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128

2022-08-07 06:35:41.696445-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128

2022-08-07 11:40:19.690762-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128

2022-08-07 13:37:31.722643-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -104

2022-08-07 13:52:19.681924-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -104

2022-08-07 14:25:11.718230-0400 0xb5 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -104

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Log - Default: 9, Info: 0, Debug: 0, Error: 0, Fault: 0

Activity - Create: 0, Transition: 0, Actions: 0

All the -128 errors are the spontaneous shutdown while using the machine. The -104 are when attempting to create a TimeMachine backup using an USB powered disk. All failures occurred while the machine was connected to the power adapter.

I thought my google foo was okay but I never stumbled upon this answer, wish I had before spending close to a month on this.

Cheers all,

Nitin

MacOS update to 11.7 includes an updated kernel and requires this fix to be reapplied.