Black screen after Sierra update (today)

Somehow my previous post isn't visible. Anyway, after upgrading my 2011 Mac Mini from Sierra to High Sierra I would get the Black Screen of Death about 2/3rds of the way though the boot. [I have heard rumors that if you blindly enter the password at this point, you can progress beyond the BSOD. I can't verify this though.]. Once I got the machine to boot (after leaving it on overnight), but a restart brought back the BSOD. The other 19 times, nada.

To fix: boot with Command - R (or MS Screen - R for MS keyboards), reinstall the OS (it doesn't download a new OS copy again, but uses the previously downloaded and verified disk image), and you will be good to go. You do not need to revert to an old OS version from TM.

After High Sierra "upgrade", the boot would go 2/3rds of the way through and then g to "black screen of death BSD". The boot had finished since I can hear the sound responses to keyboard typing etc. Once (out of 20 tries) I left the boot process run overnight and I got the screen back. But as soon as I did a restart, back came the BSD. I'm about 17 minutes away from seeing if a Command R - reinstall works. So far so good.

Not just a black screen for me - Mac mini c.2011 tried the password trick but to no avail. Shall try a reboot and wait it out. The last 4 updates have caused some serious slowdown to this machine and display issues. What’s happening Apple?

Hi

Your post has brought me out of similar problem with macOS-High Sierra when reinstalling it after resetting MacBook Pro 2013 model. I followed your advice and got positive result immediately. Thanks for sharing.

Regards

S.M. Shah

I upgraded today to 10.12.6 and had a similar issue reported here: Sierra update to 10.12.6 made my mac boot to disk utilities

I solved it with the First Aid option of disk utilities, at least it has booted one time after it. Hope it is solved, but seems that something is wrong with this update.

So I had this problem as well, and it was due to an issue with the login plist. To delete and recreate the login plist, I did the following from single user mode (Command-S during boot) or from terminal using recovery mode (Command-R during boot) Note that the paths are different when using recovery mode, as root directory is moved to "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/".

1. /sbin/fsck -fy
2. /sbin/mount -uw /
3. rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
4. rm -f /var/db/.AppleUpgrade
5. reboot

After reboot i was able to log in as normal. Hope it helps!

I have had the same experience with the same era Mac. I tried the re-install route and ended up with a log in screen that had no curser and would not accept my user name/password. Repeated forced restarts left me nowhere. I tried reinstalling again and the curser came back, but still cannot log in. Can't do anything. I have older drives that I can boot from, but there seems to be no way to fix this nightmare. I can't use time machine because the drive won't boot.

Anyone have a suggestion of the least destruction and time consuming way to solve this? I have trolled the many sad postings about 10.12.x and wish I had not started this....three days ago...

Now you've got the cursor back with the black screen, have you tried typing (even though you can't see it) the first letter of your user name, then hit return, then type (again invisibly) your password and hit return again?

This worked for me!! Such a simple solution. I've tried every other solution and all I had to do was enter my password again.

It's interesting as I always wondered why I had to enter my password twice when logging into my user account, and it didn't occur to me that it was only asking once before facing the black screen.

Thanks for sharing.

I just spend the night trying to fix this issue.

Re-installed Sierra, reset the SMC, did the PRAM sequence.

Nothing worked until I found this article:

http://betanews.com/2016/12/15/blank-screen-cursor-macos-update-fix/

Worked for me.

I had the exactly same problem. Spent two days calling Apple support before they finally got me connected with a supervisor. Two new installs didn't help and he finally had me boot up and type in a series of UNIX commands to get things working. That helped for about a week until this morning when the screen went black again. This time I restarted and was able to get my screen back. Scary to not be confident I'll see anything every time I open my MacBook Air.

Thanks for the many replies to this problem that Sierra created. I had to give up, having wasted days of work, trying most of the work-arounds suggested and restored back to OS 10.11.6. Still working fine. I would like to upgrade but cannot risk the loss of work and time at this time. The reports of solutions that worked are too involved for me to get interested in. I don't want to have to keyboard unix code to get an os to work.

Apple, we aren't supposed to have to go into Terminal, after being told by some other sufferer what code to use, to get an update to work with your OS.

I had the same problem with a 2016 MacBook Pro. It would allow me to sign in as a user but upon sign in it would flash the screen saver and then go black with cursor. showing.

After it went black, I followed one suggestion shown, and went ahead and put in my password again and the normal operation came up.

I am now backing up and hope that issue is solved.

Just want to express my sincere appreciation for the support everyone gives here. When it happend to me it was January 1st and a great way to start the new year. I guess I was one of the first because Apple support told me they hadn't had any similar reports as mine, and I coulnd't find anything about it on the Internet. Personally I'd think since this could have, and has had such a significant effect on Apple customers they would have rolled out a fix by now. Anyhow this also makes me wonder if I should turn off auto updates. Next time I'll probably wait a few days to check on compatibility issues before upgrading. Thank for the feedback everyone!

10.12.1 = 🙂 > 10.12.2 = 😠 👿 < 10.12.1 = 🙂 > 10.12.3 = am I going to be 🙂 pls ℹ

Be interesting to hear from people who had this problem with 10.12.2 (😠 👿) and who had reverted back to 10.12.1 (🙂) and who have now upgraded to today's latest version release 10.12.3 (🙂 ℹ) and have experienced none of the same problems we have had with 10.12.2. (😠 👿) or are there new problems? (ℹ)

I am going to hang off for a couple weeks this time as opposed to diving in like I have always done for the last 10 years (once bitten twice shy)