macOS High Sierra is a nightmare

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Level 1

16 points

macOS High Sierra is a nightmare

I have a late 2012 iMac running smoothly for so long until I decided to upgrade to macOS High Sierra.

First, the upgrade failed. Just saying cannot install onto my Mac without much detail. Cannot rollback and therefore my external hard disk was stuck a non-bootable state.

Then I tried to restore my system to an empty disk using time machine and update it to High Sierra. Failed again and this time it ask me to use Apple AHT to test. I followed and found 4MEM error. Bingo, I thought. I rushed to replaced the RAM. Use AHT again and no more error. I thought I can continue the installation. So try again. But this time, still cannot install. Now it said OSStatus error 2.

Then I tried Internet recovery and downgraded the system to Mountain Lion. macOS can now boot into Finder. This time I try to upgrade directly from there. Again failed with OSStatus error 2.

My system is still not working yet and 4 days passed. What a waste of time! I never had such a bad experience with OS upgrade. This is simply the worst.

iPad Air-OTHER, iOS 7.0.3, 32GB wifi

Posted on Oct 5, 2017 9:38 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

chriskan0305 Author

Level 1

16 points

Oct 7, 2017 5:20 AM in response to chriskan0305

Finally I got this resolved myself.

However, this is a good event for learning. Apparently the upgrade process envisioned by Apple is not well-thought through enough. By going through the process with some problematic hardware (well, I don't know beforehand that I have some problematic devices), I noticed that the internal structure of the upgrade process could be improved.

To recap my problem, I downloaded the High Sierra installer, start the upgrade and then ends up with an error message

saying that it cannot be installed. I then fire up the disk utility in the macOS installer, checked the disk and it returned an error of invalid count -69862 or something. I ignored the issue and try again. The installation failed again and I got OSStatus Error 2.

I tried AHT as instructed by the screen. Now it reported 4MEM/61/4000000 blah blah blah. This one indicates that I have a faulty RAM module. And High Sierra said installation cannot proceed with installation and my hard disk (an SSD) is left in a state that is not bootable and locked. I bought some new RAM modules, replace it and hope the installation can proceed without problem. Of course, it did not happen.

Then I .... (skipped one million words) ... tried all sorts of things upgrading downgrading blah blah blah without success. Time machine makes things worse because the macOS is also restored, messing up the already messed up installation. Better restore onto clean hard disk rather than on top of the messed up hard disk. One week passed.

What I can conclude is that during failure, actually there is no way to recover from the installation. It seems that the fact that High Sierra converting HFS+ into APFS for SSD behind the scene might need an escape path. Since I got error during disk check, High Sierra does not know what to do and it just said cannot be installed, leaving all moved files and copied files intact without recovering (no housekeeping for rolling back). And the fact that macOS compresses stuff in RAM but encountered some faulty RAM also might contribute to the behaviour of the installer that I encountered. I also suspect due to RAM issue, the High Sierra installer might got corrupted in memory or during download. I think these two issues are not envisioned because the assumption that RAM is good and hard disk file count is correct seems to be working so far so good.

I can only reinstalled Mountain Lion and reboot into Finder without problem. El Capitan and Sierra both failed in installation and cannot boot into Finder.

Enough for the rampant. If you somehow ends up in situation like me, may be this is your solution:

1) get a big enough hard disk, format it

2) get High Sierra installer and create a bootable one

3) clean install High Sierra onto this newly formatted hard disk

4) use Migration assistant to transfer the users to the new hard disk

5) optionally, format the original hard disk and either clone or repeat step 1-4 to transfer all content back

As a by-product, I also learned how to upgrade the late 2012 iMac myself. If you do not care about warranty, it might be just for you. Kinda fun.

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Answer 2

SeaPapp

Level 7

26,502 points

Oct 6, 2017 3:09 AM in response to chriskan0305

Restore to Mountain Lion, go to the Mac App Store-Purchases and redownload the last version you were running before the failed upgrades and install that, wait till all the bugs are worked out of HS before upgrading.

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Answer 3

rkaufmann87

Level 10

149,062 points

Oct 5, 2017 9:49 AM in response to chriskan0305

Have you any antivirus, cleaning or ANY third party maintenance apps installed on the computer?

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Answer 4

iCare

Level 4

2,490 points

Oct 5, 2017 10:58 AM in response to chriskan0305

What type hard drive are you using for your backup? There are other discussion board posts from people using a WD hard drive who report that their issue was resolved when they read the special WD instructions for Time Machine users available at http://products.wdc.com/updates/docs/en/appletimemachine.pdf.

If applicable, when you get prompted for your password enter the following

User: wd_backup

Pass: backup

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Answer 5

Jan 6, 2018 11:02 PM in response to chriskan0305

We've upgraded three of our workstations to High Sierra and yes it is an absolute nightmare. We are in the process of dumping everything onto a NAS drive, wiping out all the systems and returning them to a previous version until Apple releases a more stable and compatible version. To give you an example all our peripherals devices stopped working properly including mice, etc. as their drivers were not compatible even though they are the most recent, Autocad Mac won't run as it doesn't work with High Sierra's file system and there is some version in the works who knows when it will be here, and neither does our copy of Vectorworks. I could write a book on this release. It seems like the quality control Apple was famous for went out the window.

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Answer 6

jontalk

Level 1

11 points

Oct 5, 2017 10:52 AM in response to chriskan0305

I have a late 2011 version (i5, 8 GB RAM) running Sierra with zero problems. Did you update from Sierra to High Sierra and are you aware of the update to High Sierra just released? I don't feel I want to update to High Sierra until all the bugs are worked out..So sorry to hear of your problems

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Answer 7

SeaPapp

Level 7

26,502 points

Oct 7, 2017 10:45 AM in response to chriskan0305

chriskan0305 wrote:

Some applications will got crippled because they work with later versions like Sierra.

If you were running Sierra successfully and followed my suggestion to reinstall Sierra from your App Store purchases the applications would not be crippled. But nonetheless as long as you've got everything sorted now it doesn't matter. Good job.

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Answer 8

etresoft

Level 9

58,240 points

Oct 7, 2017 6:08 PM in response to SeaPapp

Mike Sombrio wrote:

reinstall Sierra from your App Store purchases

Mike,

Apple has purged Sierra from the App Store. If people weren't paranoid enough to save a copy of the installer, like chriskan0305 apparently was, there is no going back.

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Answer 9

etresoft

Level 9

58,240 points

Oct 7, 2017 8:26 PM in response to chriskan0305

That is what I was referring to. I guess I'm not entirely sure where you were trying to install High Sierra. I see that you mentioned "external drive" originally. Perhaps that is why you still had a recovery volume. I would have assumed that a failed install would have trashed (or upgraded) your recovery volume too.

For the record, your Time Machine backup is bootable. Like your boot disk, it has a recovery volume hidden away. If Internet Recovery gives you some ancient OS (as it seems to have done in your case) or the latest OS (which would be High Sierra), then you would have to be clever or lucky to ever boot into Sierra again.

As I'm looking over your last post, I'm not entirely sure your recovery volume was Sierra. You were trying to install High Sierra and appear to have finally gotten it installed. If you didn't save an old Sierra install app, then your Sierra booting days are over.

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Answer 10

Dec 29, 2017 1:16 PM in response to chriskan0305

I had the same issue on my macbook pro (2012) automatic updates were going well until the install download timed out at 4minutes for like 40minutes. Now the app store opens up blank and all my chrome browser doesn't work. I don't use safari and firefox is horrible. The macbook was running fine before this update.

I've read other posts that high sierra will render your system useless and mess up everything. Why didn't Apple set up a clean install? Horror stories of people erasing hard drives, buying a new mac computer or not being able to downgrade or reset from a time machine backup. I tried the direct download of all the mac sierra dmg files and El Capitan files, nothing works and I keep getting error files. Good one Apple, now I can't use Apple TV and have the continuous "6" digit security codes popping up to "allow" devices to work with each other. This loyal user may jump ship and go back to PC / Windows. Forced obsolescence?

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