Problems with macOS Sierra? This fix may help you.

Your steps could easily have nothing to do with any actual problem, these procedures are specific to actual issues which you failed to define, and many times doing them let alone repeating them is completley unnecessary and misinforming users to perform tasks that aren't necessary for their specific issues:

If your mac is experiencing issues when booting this is the first place you go

Try safe mode if your Mac doesn't finish starting up - Apple Support

If you are having issues with batteries or system going to sleep and not waking up, shutting down without your consent, erratic fans, et al, thats the SMC

Reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support

if your system cant find the boot drive that's NVRAM

How to Reset NVRAM on your Mac - Apple Support

If your boot is showing a disk with a line through or wont boot under any circumstance thats a recovery issue

About OS X Recovery - Apple Support

if your disk is throwing errors that a disk utility issue

Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks - Apple Support

First and foremost, uninstall Clean My Mac. It causes many more

issues than the "threat" it is trying to protect you from. It is more of

a malware than malware itself!!

TThank you very much! I'll do what you suggest.

Thank you for tips Dianeoforegon!

Hi BrianSel,

Thank you for help. Yes, everything was ok with the speakers and the sound before installing OS Sierra.

Will do what you're suggesting.

Orion

So here's what happened. I went through the procedure, at least as much of it as would work. Reset NVRAM and the SMC. When I restarted, I noticed a new problem right at that point that keeps recurring now, a quarter inch or so bar horizontally across the screen while it's restarting, multicolors mixed together, that then goes away. Never saw anything like that before! Then, booted to Recovery Mode, no problem, ran First Aid within Disk Utility, no problem, but as was happening in the last day or so, when I chose "Reinstall Mac OS" within Recovery Mode, a window opened and asked me to click on Continue to do the reinstall. I did, and a small window opened telling me that Apple will verify that I'm eligible, I clicked the choice to have it proceed (may have also said Continue, I don't remember the word), and then absolutely nothing happened. I gave it an hour, clicked on Continue again, it did the same about verifying with nothing happening, and eventually I quit that effort and chose the option to restart selecting a start up, which was just OS 10.12, and it restarted but again, I saw that horizontal, multicolor bar for a bit before I was up and running again. And no problems that I had before have disappeared. (On the positive side, I just got an email from Apple Engineering asking me to explain my Wireless issue and to turn on some tracking data thing, so at least they are looking at that one element of my problem.) I keep hoping that they'll just issue 10.12.1, and that every issue will be gone, but fat chance of that. Any idea what could have caused me to gain one problem doing your entire procedure, namely the multicolor bar across the window during startup/restart? And any idea why in Recovery Mode, Reinstall isn't doing anything. (Yesterday I reinstalled by downloading a copy of Sierra from the App Store, but that didn't fix any issues for me.)

Thanks,

Larry

If you can add a small partition approx 30-50 GB, install Sierra clean on the partition. Boot into the partition and test. You should see a remarkable difference. Once you see what a clean install can do, clone your drive then boot from the clone and wipe the internal drive and do a clean install. DO NOT use migration. Only drag over your personal files.

Diane - Thanks. I would need more info about how to do each of those steps- adding a small partition, installing clean in the partition, booting into the partition, cloning my drive, booting from the clone, wiping the internal drive, doing a clean install. BTW, for cloning, the only drive I have in addition to my internal drive is a Time Capsule. And remember, for some reason, loading a new copy of Sierra from Recovery Mode doesn't work.

Thanks!

How much free space on your internal drive?

If you can budget for an external drive, the 3T drives are often the best buy. You can partition large drives to use for multiple purposes.

SUGGESTIONS FOR EXTERNAL DRIVE

Check out the Western Digital My Book. Mac and/or PC. Get the one that is cheapest. We will format with Disk Utility and not use the WD software. Prices vary so check first.

WD My Book Hard Drive for Mac 3 TB (WDBYCC0030HBK-NESN)

WD My Book 3 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Backup (WDBFJK0030HBK-NESN

BestBuy, Staples, Office Depot will match Amazon pricing.

I have 375 GB of free space on my internal drive. I’d rather not buy an external drive if I can help it, have no other need. My Time Capsule holds my backup.

You have plenty of room to partition your internal drive.

Open Disk Utility

Select the drive

Select Drive > Partition

Leave enough free space on your internal drive (approx 10-20GB) and make the remainder into a new partition.

You can name it Sierra or whatever you want.

Select to install Sierra on this drive. You might need to boot into recover drive to download Sierra again but if possible it would be faster to download from App Store.

I'll get to it after I solve my other issues. I've spent all day with Mail not working. In the meantime Apple Engineering wanted me to send them some log files because wireless wasn't working periodically. And it seems that getting the wireless log files and trying to email them really wrecked my mail. So I'm mostly emailing from my iPhone and after spending the whole day in dealing with those issues, I need a break. But eventually I"ll give it a shot.