MacBook Pro hangs on boot, needs full wipe to recover

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MacBook Pro hangs on boot, needs full wipe to recover

I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Pro with Sonoma 14.2.1, and it has started to get into a state where it won’t fully boot, sticking after the user password is entered.

It boots to the Apple logo, and the progress bar on that screen completes. It then switches to a user login screen, asking for the user password. I enter that, and the progress bar appears and only goes about 5% of the way before stopping. Nothing further changes after that, the time shown on screen is frozen. I’ve waited a long time to see if it eventually clears, but that never happens. All I can do is force shutdown.

The point at which the progress bar hangs is normally when it pauses briefly then the display brightness changes and the progress bar would then continue to completion.

Safe mode does the same thing. I tried reinstalling Sonoma in Recovery mode, but that didn’t make any difference. The only way to get my MacBook back is to erase Macintosh HD in recovery, install Sonoma, and recover my data from a backup. The MacBook then carries on working fine, but eventually repeats the boot hang up.

This has happened twice in under a week, and several times over the last couple of months. I am working on the assumption that it has a hardware problem of some sort, on the basis that reinstalling Sonoma doesn’t fix things, and it’s happening during the boot process, before any applications can start. It does however pass the Apple diagnostics tests.

Before I replace it, I’d like to know if anyone else is seeing the same sort of behaviour. I might try going back to Ventura as an experiment to see if that is stable.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Feb 19, 2024 4:02 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 19, 2024 10:34 AM in response to Scotsam

Run the third party app EtreCheck and post the report here so we can examine it for clues.

Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected.

Disconnect all external devices from the laptop in case one of them is causing a problem.

I would also create another macOS admin user account now while you still can (make sure to select the Administrator option). Log into the new macOS user account to make sure it works fine. When the issue comes back when logging into the main user account, then try logging into the new user account to compare results. If the new user account works, then it means there is something going on with your main user account. If the issue also affects the new user account, then it is a system wide issue of some sort.

When you perform the clean install, how are you erasing the disk?

When you perform the clean install, are you restoring from a backup? Including apps, settings, and user account & data? Maybe just try restoring just the user account so you must manually download & reinstall third party apps and reconfigure them. And only install the most essential apps.

Are you running any anti-virus apps, cleaning/optimizer apps, or third party security software? These types of apps are known to cause all sorts of problems with macOS with some of them even corrupting the system & its settings. Uninstall them if you have them....better yet do not install them at all after a clean install of macOS.

For an Apple Silicon Mac, the best way to perform a clean install of macOS is by performing a DFU firmware Restore which resets the security enclave chip & system firmware, and erases the internal SSD & pushes a clean OS onto the internal SSD. Unfortunately this process requires access to another Mac running macOS 14.x unless you have access to an older version of the Apple Configurator 2 app (version 2.16 or earlier) which only requires access to another Mac running macOS 12.4+.

If you have access to another Mac, you can try a DFU firmware Revive instead which will reset the security enclave chip & system firmware. Theoretically a "Revive" should not affect any data on the internal SSD, but if there is a hardware issue, then it might.

How to revive or restore Mac firmware - Apple Support

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MacBook Pro hangs on boot, needs full wipe to recover

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