Yosemite boots to barred circle

Question

Yosemite boots to barred circle

tl;dr version: Installing Yosemite has borked my computer to the point where restoring from Time Machine does not fix it. It boots to a barred circle and that's it.

I installed Yosemite two days ago. The install did not go well. There was a period where I had multiple kernel panics, one after another, repeatedly, creating reboot after reboot after reboot. It was only after a dozen of them that I realized (hearing the optical drive reset from the other room) that something was wrong. It's a good thing I have the optical drive, because the installer turned off my boot chime - without that, it might have rebooted continuously for an hour before I noticed.

Once I restarted the install continued, and as many other people are reporting, the install took forever. Then it got stuck in the barred-circle symbol. It reliably gets to that on each reboot now. I tried using Disk Utility. It went to the barred circle. I tried reinstalling. It went to the barred circle. I restored from my Time Machine backup and it still won't boot, which is infuriating. I backed up my computer and I'm still paying for the mistake of installing Yosemite. I still get the barred circle. I'm writing this from Safari in my restore partition because the restore partition is all I can get to on this computer any more.

Needless to say, Yosemite is not my operating system of choice at this time. Any suggestions?

OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB RAM

Posted on Oct 18, 2014 11:31 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 18, 2014 1:21 PM in response to Colin Fredericks

Forgot to mention that I also tried zapping the PRam and booting in safe mode. No luck with either.Currently trying another reinstall of Yosemite.

Reply

Answer 2

Oct 20, 2014 4:27 AM in response to Colin Fredericks

The third reinstall failed, so I went for the nuclear option: erase and reinstall. This finally put the computer into a bootable state. I was able to log in.

Then I used Migration Assistant to get all the data back from Time Machine, and the whole thing went to **** again. Eleven hours to copy things over (or ”21 minutes" if you believe the progress bar). Aaaand it's back to the barred circle again.

Suggestions still welcome.

Reply

Answer 3

Oct 20, 2014 10:14 AM in response to Colin Fredericks

DOES NOT COMPUTE.

(literally)

Reply

Answer 4

Oct 20, 2014 10:18 AM in response to Colin Fredericks

Monday morning: did another erase-and-reinstall. This time when I used Migration Assistant I didn't transfer my Applications folder or the MacPorts user directory, in the hopes that one of those was the problem. It seems that that is the case. It could be that there were just too **** many files at once with all of those together, but I don't have that many files, especially compared to professional developers.

My sincere hope is that MacPorts was the thing causing the issue, because I can live without that (and I don't have it on my work computer). If it's something in the Applications folder, this will be a long and slow process indeed to get everything back in working order. I'm going to try to use Migration Assistant again to bring the Applications folder back. If anyone is reading this you'll hear from me later today or tomorrow either way.

Reply

Answer 5

Oct 20, 2014 4:09 PM in response to Colin Fredericks

I'm finally using my computer again. Only took four days...

Using Migration Assistant for my applications was definitely a waste. The "countdown" timer just kept counting up, and I had things to do with my life, so I just tried drag-and-dropping all my applications from the Time Machine backup to my Applications folder. This nearly worked! It stalled on Pages, and it works in alphabetical order, so I just copied everything from after Pages, and then reinstalled Pages when I was done. Success! I'm using my own computer again.

I don't know if there's a corrupted file in my Time Machine backup - there could be multiple issues here, I suppose. The lesson I learned was that Migration Assistant isn't as good as just copying files old-school. I'm sure I'll run into a few applications that say "this application wasn't originally installed on this computer", but dealing with that will be faster and easier than waiting seven hours for Migration Assistant to maybe complete and maybe not and maybe ruin my install.

I wish I could give more definite advice to other folks who are running into this issue. All I can recommend at the moment is trying it without MacPorts if you have that, and dragging your applications "by hand" instead of using Migration Assistant.

Reply