Boot failure after High Sierra Update

IT4apple, this a good point to start from. I had a comparable situation at a custumor who installed the "10.13.2 Additional Update": Boot failure, grey screen never got finished, verbose mode shows looping entries with "Process crashed opendirectoryd [...] too many corpses being created" (or similar). And of course, NO Time Machine backup :-(

We got the Mac back to life with this procedure:

1. Boot the Mac from another drive or connect it in target mode to another Mac running the same OS Version
2. Clone the faulty installation from the original startup disk to another volume. Maybe "Recovery HD" can do the job - I did it with another Mac and Carbon Copy Cloner. I would recommend to use a target volume on a different disk drive. I was in lack of this and split the original partition into two partitions - shrinking the original partition and creating an empty one - although cloning and restoring is very fast (internal bus), this is really risky! Then I cloned the original volume to the newly created on the same drive.
3. Erase the original partition completely (so you should be extremely sure, that step 2 was successful!)
4. Install a newly downloaded High Sierra on the original (now empty) volume
5. During first boot from the fresh install let the Migration Assistant migrate everything (users, applications and so on) from the clone drive to the original drive.

We got everything back, the Mac runs stable – and the first thing to do is configuring Time Machine...

Hope, this may help someone.

Greetings from Hamburg

There are two locations, where extensions are stored:

1. /System/Library/Extensions (here are the most, but it's unlikely to find something wrong here, I think)
2. /Library/Extensions (here go drivers to be used by every user - quite a number of non-Apple)

Start the faulty Mac into target mode and connect it to a working one. Then you can have a look at the directories and compare their content to the corresponding directories of the working Mac. Be sure to mark "ignore permissions" in the Information window (Finder menu "File" -> "Informations") of the external connected drive of the faulty Mac. Otherwise you won't be able to do any changes. But: Be careful - one may destroy the installed system completely.

If you find something suspicious, don't delete it, but move it to another directory. I would suggest to create folders

1. /System/Library/Extensions_disabled
2. /Library/Extensions_disabled

Be sure to document your work. You must be safe to be able to undo your changes!

When you're done, eject the drive of the Mac in target mode and disconnect the cables.

Shut down the faulty Mac

Start up the faulty Mac

Is it still faulty? Then you may repeat the above.

This is a very short outline how I would troubleshoot this bad booting behaviour.

If you try this, do it at your own risk. Whish you the best.

For my situation, the machine that had the problem was already on High Sierra. 10.13.2 I believe, and it had been running on that for some time. I saw the same error in verbose boot as posted above by Olaf re: "...too many corpses created..." (Gotta love that error message!) I looked for a solution to repair it and get it to boot again and found nothing out there. I assume something in the OS got corrupted that kept it from booting completely (safe mode didn't work for me either). I threw in the towel on fixing it and looked for a way to recover data.

For me it was as simple as using recovery mode to boot, restoring the internal hard drive (source) to an external drive (target) with disk utility (see my Jan 4, 2018 post above for a link to more detailed instructions from another post), then erasing the local disk and reinstalling High Sierra on it. I chose not to migrate as I liked the idea of a fresh install in this case.

Afterward, the user was able to recover her Lightroom catalog and I was also able to recover her Windows 10 VM Fusion machine from the external drive, which saved time not having to rebuild her Windows environment. All files were accessible on the external hard drive backup and could therefore be recovered.

How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support
Cheers.

Do you have a SDXC memory card inserted somewhere during to upgrade process?

pci pause: SDXC

Waiting for DSMOS...

Mid 2012 MacBook Pro - installed High Sierra on a clean drive (10.13.3). Got stuck in the boot as noted here. Deleted the disk again and reinstalled and it worked. Installed Office 2016, the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite and Carbon Copy Cloner and my files and the machine was stable for about 4 days. Then, while on web sites (mostly this one and a few work-related) message = "web page reloaded because a problem occurred". Then machine began to shut down intermittently with the Kernel Panic screen (multi-language - your computer shut down because of a problem). This became more frequent until the machine would not boot again. Would not start in safe mode or boot in any other manner. Received one "kernel error" statement. Ran etrecheck - all hardware was fine and plenty of memory. A few things to note in etrecheck:

System Launch Agents:

System Launch Daemons:

Top Processes by CPU:

Top Processes by Memory:

Tried to deal with kernel extension issue through another posting here and failed.

Back to Genius bar - most Apple help has been very good to great - this guy was awful!! Did not know what he was doing - said he needed a faster internet connection in the back and he would reinstall (after disk deleted again). Came back with Mavericks reinstalled. Note - all hardware checked out to be fine.

My question to him was - which software is causing the kernel issue (how do you figure it out)? Because if everything is put back on the same way - why would you expect a different result? Fast forward - upgraded again to HS, installed only Office 2016. Have had 1 shut down again to the same error window with multi-language as before when i opened Word (only did it once).

So does this tell me Office 2016 is the issue, or is it happenstance?

Is it a kernel issue (seems that the software i have installed should be okay at this point)? or is it something deeper in High Sierra and an older (mid 2012) machine?

Next step - go back to Sierra and Office 2011 which was running on the machine without any issues.

Does the new version of High Sierra, 10.13.3 solves this problem..?

I have the same problem with my MacMini and the only solution found was reinstall an old version of MacOS 10.12.1.

MacOS High Sierra works up to version 10.13.1...!

Hi everyone, I have exactly the same problem!

migrated successfully to High Sierra about two or three weeks ago. Only now happening. Disk and iMac are ok, the disk utility runs ok. But I am stuck with the progress bar “all white“ and nothing happens.

Already tried to to reinstall from recovery the latest macOS version. No success, same behavior.

I have a question: if I restore from an old Time Machine backup, can I restore simply the operating system or will the process erase all newer files? I never tried this... is the process selective?

Thanks a lot in advance

Best regards

Claudio

I have the same problem, too. MacMini. HighSierra update... "too many corpses being created."

I still hope I will not have to go through TimeMachine Recovery Process. Anyone has another solution to solve this issue?

IS APPLE SUPPORT AWARE??

Thanks to all on this thread.

My computer has had many issues since the very first Sierra. The update to High Sierra, I thought might fix the many issues. Did not. The last update to High Sierra has ruined my computer. It would not boot. I did everything. Tried recovery, disk utility repair, booting in safe mode (would not). Worked 12 hours, nothing. Could not even reinstall High Sierra, quit halfway. Finally I recalled I had backed up my computer on an external drive before moving few months back. Uploaded contents and it now works on regular Sierra. Working fine. I honestly do not know why apple does not fire these programing idiots or listen to their customers. They need to get a clue. I have ordered a new Imac (which is sitting in the floor waiting for me to set it up) because I thought this one was dead, dead, dead. Learning moment- Always use external backup.

The new Mac is due to an entirely different issue I had with a scam company called Data Align who I gave remote access to fix my issues and hacked my computer. I called Yahoo and think they intercepted the call. I tried to remove or uninstall their programs and found some impossible to do. The previous remote backup on an external drive fixed that issue. Took me back to the first Sierra OS which is working fine. My computer is 2011 and thought I might a well get a new one. I definitely do not think I will use High Sierra. Doubt that anyone from Apple looks at these anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hate the High Sierra but like the overall Mac. For now.