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lilninja9 Author

Level 1

20 points

Mac wont boot after successful High Sierra install

Hey,

I've recently successfully updated my MacBook Pro (2012) from Sierra to High Sierra and was actually bug free for most of it now. Until yesterday, alas.

I don't remember having any trouble when I shut it down last time but it won't boot anymore now. The progress bar runs toward the middle as usual but then stops and continues so slowly you barely see ist. After around 10 minutes it reaches the end and the bar ist completely black but nothing changes from then on. I let him give it a try over night but nothing again.

So I tried:

-Safe Boot

-First Aid in Disk Utility in Recovery Mode

-Single User Mode: fsck -fy

-Reset NVRAM

-Reset SMC

-Re-Install High Sierra in Recovery Mode (where the time had to be adjusted because of "The recovery server could not be contacted")

-Safe Boot with Verbose Mode (it said "Process[1xx] crashed: opendirectoryd. Too many corpses being created" before and after re-install-attempt and goes on infinitely)

nothing worked. The next step would be to use the Time Maschine but being the idiot I am, the last backup was 2 months ago. I'd love to avoid losing that data.

Has anyone else encountered that problem? From what I read, at least one of these methods did the trick for other people or they were smarter and used their Time Machine more responsibly.

Thanks for your answer!

lilninja9

Posted on Oct 25, 2017 1:47 PM

Top-ranking reply

lilninja9 Author

Level 1

20 points

Posted on Oct 30, 2017 2:52 AM

(My) Solution: Restore internal drive to external, erase internal drive and re-install the OS. I saved my data but have to adjust everything from the start, i.e. install my apps.

Yes, I did but alas with quite the effort and not as I had intended to. But I have to admit, I didn't contact the support since I did not have time to chat or call.

No Target Disk Mode available

Since I did not have somebody with a Mac around, I could not connect my Mac via Target Disk Mode. It would have been possible with my Windows PC but it doesn't have a FireWire or Thunderbolt Connection. An adapter from these to USB was about 100€ on Amazon.

Restore to external drive as backup

Instead, I bought another external drive the same size as my internal. I plugged it in and started in Recovery mode (Cmd + R). There, I opened Disk Utility and selected the new external drive and clicked "Restore" (didn't work at first, the error "Restore Failure: Recovery partition restores can only be done on GPT partition maps" appeared, so I erased and re-partitioned it, I think, I am not exactly sure anymore). In the following menu, I selected the internal drive with my data to be the source, meaning everything gets copied exactly the way it is from my internal to my external drive so I had a backup. I made sure it had worked by installing MacDrive on my Windows PC (allows it to read Mac OS Extended - Journaled format) and was happy to find my pictures, texts and everything on there. I definitely had my backup.

Erase drive and re-install OS

I went back to Disk Utility in Recovery Mode and selected my internal drive and clicked "Erase". After that, I re-installed the original OS (Recovery Mode: Shift + Opt + Cmd + R), which was Mountain Lion in my case, and went from there. (I continued to Yosemite as it was the only OS besides High Sierra that I found in the store)

El Capitan and Sierra can't be found via search anymore and don't appear in your Purchased-Tab anymore so I searched the internet for links leading me there (I hope posting is okay... El Capitan: https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/os-x-el-capitan/id1147835434?mt=12 Sierra: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-sierra/id1127487414?mt=12).

Since I was on Yosemite, I didn't need El Capitan for upgrading and installed Sierra instead. Since everything is now gone, I have to re-install all my apps, transfer my files back, adjust the settings etc. On the other hand, my Mac is set up new and clean again 😉

I'd be happy if there was another solution to it, i.e. repairing the damage in the OS or something like that, but time was short since I needed my friend so I went with the violent option.

Best of luck saving your data!

lilninja9

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17 replies

Jan 10, 2018 9:27 PM in response to lilninja9

Thank you so much!! Your solution just saved my life, I was out of ideas after trying everything and was almost taking my iMac to assistance. Again, thank you for posting this!

Jan 17, 2018 2:47 PM in response to airjarvis

I’m having the exact same issue - this is ridiculous. Every solution I tried leads to a grey screen and recovery won’t load.

Mac wont boot after successful High Sierra install