El Capitan won't Boot after update

Not only amazing, but frustrating and very disappointing not to hear anything from apple!

I strongly agree, not to say subito!

If third party apps are responsible for the black screen boot problem in El Capitan, then it is reasonable to think that someone at Apple is on top of this.

If so, then that person or one of his or her people needs to publish a list of those apps ASAP. Like ASAP!

Apple doesn't test third-party software. That is up to the developer. Nobody at Apple will provide a "fix" for problems caused by third-party software.

You have to figure out what system modifications you installed and eliminate them. If you can boot into Safe Mode, that may help in isolating where they are installed.

Whoa. Let's step back. I am a customer, not a developer. If there are known issues with OS X, particularly something that cause a machine not to boot and freeze, Apple has an ABSOLUTE DUTY to notify customers.

FYI, I have now spent about 3 hours trying to find a work around. I am an experienced Mac user. I also began using computers back in the 1960s. I have a clue. Much more importantly, I depend on my machine to make a living. Right now, I am dead in the water when I am supposed to be delivering something in connection with a major financial transaction. I cannot connect my machine to the internet, nor are there any machines that I can use for a remote boot. I also am no where close to any Apple store.

Bottom line, I am ******.

To have a problem come in right out of the blue and stop a person who does what I do is unforgivable on Wall Street and anywhere else at the top of the professional world everywhere on the globe. Fortunately, this is the first time in my career that i have not delivered my work exactly as promised.

Make some calls within Apple. Relate my situation, and ask people whether this is the best they can do. The answer should be no. If it is not, then you have a serious organizational problem. Customer needs should always come first. Always. Pointing fingers at some unknown developer in a case like this is amateurism of the highest order.

All companies have problems. What separates the great from the rest is how they handle them. Apple's response to this problem of machines not booting is incredible. Time to change the leader who is responsible for this. There are plenty of jobs at microsoft for people who do not give a **** about customers.

Many thanks, again. I also lost my broadband connection...it is one of those days.

i Found the recovery mode was set to Ethernet, so that altered took the deep breath to wipe my hard drive and use an end of October backup (I may return to el capitan not till it has been sorted out) So 9 hours ago (?) it said I started the back up installation and it has just finished...the screen is normal brightness, the apple logo is showing but that status bar is not moving. Tried switching off then on again...nothing.

Help!! Ive wiped my hard drive and it still isn't working -except screen brightness. I do have my connection working again so can reply to you

I had this same issue after installing El Capitan. Everything seemed fine until I tried to restart. I finally got it shut down and when I tried to start again it wouldn't boot.

Max108 over on the Developer Forums fixed the problem for me and my MacBook Pro is starting up just fine now. I found him here: https://forums.developer.apple.com/message/68726

Turns out, AVG free anti virus was the culprit in my case....

After 6 wasted hours, I am still not up.

Bottom line for me is that I as soon as I am able to do so, I am going to rid of El Capitan and drop back to Yosemite. Hindsight is 20/20. I should not have upgraded to El Capitan without checking the boards to see what kind of problems people were having.

I did spend about an hour at an Apple store looking through El Capitan as completely as I could. What I saw was so similar to Yosemite, that I concluded, wrongly, that there would be no important issues moving from Yosemite to El Capitan. Most certainly in booting my machine, which is a top of the line late 2014 MacBook Pro with Retina display. Unfortunately, there was no way to know for sure. Hence an assumption had to be made. In this case, that assumption is what is known as a critical assumption v. a working assumption. Critical assumptions are those that if wrong can sink your canoe.

Finally, I also will be sending an urgent priority notice to all of my friends and clients NOT to install El Capitan for a months or until Apple assures customers that the failure to boot problem has been identified and permanently eliminated. I will recommend that my notice be passed on as widely as possible as quickly as possible.

What a bloody mess. All caused by some person at Apple who is disconnected from the customer base. That person should be fired.

Finally, I also will be sending an urgent priority notice to all of my friends and clients NOT to install El Capitan for a months or until Apple assures customers that the failure to boot problem has been identified and permanently eliminated. I will recommend that my notice be passed on as widely as possible as quickly as possible.

If you installed the same third-party crapware on their Macs as you have installed on yours, then that is likely sage advice. Better advice would be to get rid of the crapware.

I managed to fix my MacPro4,1 with RAID array ... It was fairly contrived and took me a weekend, but I'm really happy with El Capitan now.

Luckily I had access to another Mac to build myself a USB key containing the El Capitan installer.

My symptoms were pretty horrendous: Wouldn't boot into Restore, Single User or Safe Mode off the internal El Capitan install.

Set up is MacPro4,1 with 4x1TB AppleRAID configured striped mirrored-pairs (RAID1+0??)

[1] With access to another Mac I downloaded the Installer and built a bootable USB key

[2] Insert the USB key in MacPro4,1

[3] Reboot the MacPro4,1 holding the Option key and chose the USB key to boot

Before I did anything else - I took the paranoid approach of duplicating my Macintosh HD onto another disk.

Yes - I've got my TImeMachine backup - but I'm paranoid, so after searching around on how to use Terminal.

My internal volume was using 684 GB of a 2TB AppleRAID.

After multiple attempts, I realized I had to wipe the internal disk and rebuild the RAID array. I decided to take the opportunity to build a CoreStorage logical volume for a Fusion drive with a 500 GB SSD front-ending a 4x1TB AppleRAID array. That way I could have an OS Recovery and a faster experience. You don't need to do this, but I concluded that since I was erasing the disk and recovering - why not make the machine a lot faster.

[4] I took the gutsy and terrifying step of using Disk Utility (which I hate on El Capitan) to erase the internal disk (TimeMachine = check, independent duplicate = check)

I then used Terminal to destroy and rebuild my AppleRAID, and then construct a CoreStorage volume across the SSD and AppleRAID.

Took some Google searching to find out how to "Build your own Fusion drive" and "AppleRAID and CoreStorage". Useful articles ...

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/advanced-core-storage.1566527/

http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/05/undocumented-corestorage-commands/

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-make-a-custom-corestorage-drive-in-os-x/

[5] Once I'd rebuilt my RAID and CoreStorage Volume ... I had a blank "Macintosh HD" disk

[6] Reboot again on the USB key and then Install the OS.

[7] Once the OS had installed, I then used the migration assistant to chose to migrate from my TimeMachine - do a custom migrate to get Users, Applications and Computer Settings.

[8] Once restarted, logged in as each user and confirmed that Applications, esp Mail, iCloud etc were set up correctly for everyone

This last step took a little while, I had to find Microsoft Product Keys and reactivate my version of Office.

I've still got a couple of applications that really dislike SIP changes, so I need to work on those.

That said, El Capitan is pretty good.

[9] Reconfigured TimeMachine and ran a full backup

[10] Restarted the AppleTVs around the house and checked that iPads etc can access iTunes.

Some minor stuff to fix this coming weekend ... but I realized that if I make sure I have:

(a) up to date Time Machine backup

(b) OS Recovery partition AND USB key / drive with the latest installer - being able to boot independently is crucial for a complex machine like mine

(c) Independent access to Google / Apple Forums so I can find the right Terminal commands

(d) Access to product keys

...

(e) Patience ... I've got 16,000+ images and 1000's of iTunes tracks, Podcasts, iPad Apps ...

The approach of Clean Install and Migration seems to be the approach I'll adopt again.

It cleaned out all the kexts that had been lurking in there since Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite ... etc

Side benefits:

+ My machine is a lot faster with the homebuilt Fusion drive I built in the process (good story about how to build that from SSD + 4x1TB - all internal)

+ I've decided to upgrade the RAM in the machine (32 GB in 4x8GB)

+ Machine has been stable and up for the last week or so.

Make some calls within Apple. Relate my situation, and ask people whether this is the best they can do. The answer should be no. If it is not, then you have a serious organizational problem. Customer needs should always come first. Always. Pointing fingers at some unknown developer in a case like this is amateurism of the highest order.

Apple does not control any of the other developers' actions. They also do not control you. You can install just about anything you wish with very minor restrictions. You can choose how you decide to update your computer.

If you choose to install crapware, that's what you end up with. It is up to you to control the developers, not Apple.

If they do no support you, then dump them. If you don't think Apple is supporting you, then dump them.

To have a problem come in right out of the blue and stop a person who does what I do is unforgivable on Wall Street and anywhere else at the top of the professional world everywhere on the globe.

If your Mac was that important, then why did you upgrade your Mac without testing your workflow on the new OS? If I had contracts with you and you did this I would certainly dump you.

I feel for you! It took me three days to get my macbook up and running again. Okay. It's more than likely that the backup is back on your mac. You can try two things next. First of all, try to start up in Safe Mode. Hold down the Shift key as soon as you hear the start up chime and hold it until the Apple logo and progress bar first appears. Again, there is sometimes a big of lag before anything happens. If nothing happens after 30 seconds, give it one more try in Safe mode. If you can get it to start up in Safe mode, you will have access to Finder and from there you can sort a few things out. Open Finder, go to Applications and delete anything you no longer use. In particular if you use SyncMate or anything Eltima make sure they are deleted. Then go up to the Finder menu at the top of your screen and choose Go > Go To Folder. Type in /System/Library/Extensions and click Go. Takes a few seconds for them all to load. Delete any .kext extensions to do with Eltima, SyncMate. I also deleted every .kext extension that was still lingering from a few years ago in relation to applications I no longer use. Some people just move these .kext extensions to a separate folder in case they need them again which you can do if you wish but make sure the new folder isn't in System/Library. Once you've had a good cleanout of applications and .kext files try to reboot your mac normally. Keep your fingers crossed.

If you were unable to reboot in Safe mode, try Recovery mode again. It is possible to delete .kext extensions from Terminal once you are in recovery, but I never feel quite comfortable with Terminal. Hopefully the first option will work. Good luck.

Many thanks again. Following your steps I'm now back into my MacBook, second attempt and a whole day/evening later. I'm running yosemite the back up on my time capsule after a cmd R start . No idea why it failed first time round, maybe due to broadband problems.

Phew, thank you:)

Thank you - I'm getting there...and typing this on said macbook. Tomorrow ⚠ I will go through and do the tidying up you suggest - especially those files - now I know what I'm looking for. I basically only have apple apps on my macbook - except....pretty much the whole google kit cos I'm an all platforms user - there I've said it (over the years so many OS seem to have come my way!) I'm hoping here to get away with a bit less than your 3 days:/

Thanks to your help I do now have other tips and tricks to help get me out of trouble.

But, in future I'll be more wary about updating - I did check the reviews but they covered the usual range of 1 - 5 stars ....and I believed the mantra that apple never release anything that isn't spot on, hmm.

Good night - [from the UK]

GGood morning:)

The good news is that my MacBook switched on just fine this morning, hurray:))

However when I tried to do the finder .dext search it declined to recognise that command:/

On the other hand...it is all working as far as I've got today...so far, no worries. Thank you:)

Hello again

Just to let you know that I got up the .kext files in system library - there was one Eltima file - which is now in trash. As for the others - masses of them I just don't recognise which I need and which I don't - so I'll leave them there for the time being.

I have been updating software from the back up copy, so there have been several restarts...But, El Capitan stays off my macbook for the mo...

Thanks

Chris