Boot failure after High Sierra Update

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.

It's insane that all these months later and they are still taking Macs out with this high Sierra issue. Thankfully I'm tech minded enough to fix this P.O.S. However as an apple stock holder I think it's time to sell and quit supporting such poor customer support as seen around these issues.

It literally almost cost me thousands in lost data that can't just be "reinstalled"

I am getting this error and it’s happening on my MacBook Pro 2010-2011. I was able to boot from an external drive after all my files were erased. Once the external drive is removed, I am back to square one. How can I fix this startup error? My system gets stuck at about 70 percent.

John,

great post. Thanks for that. An installed incompatible extension can much more likely be found on older Macs than on newer ones. So your monitoring matches the experiences of other users with older Macs - a complete reinstall fixes the issue - though such a huge effort seems not to be necessary at all.

I wonder if it wouldn't be possible for the installer application to check for upcoming incompatibilities before running the update. That would be a much more user friendly updating experience...

Hi John,

Do you have any information you could share on how a non-techie (who is really good at following directions!) could find these "kernal extensions"? I have a Late 2011 MacBook Pro with the exact same issue as your client, and I've been searching message boards for a solution.

My thinking is that I need to do a restore from Time Machine (I did finally figure out how to get to that with command-R), and then once I do the restore somehow find the extensions and disable older ones, and then reload High Sierra. Is that correct? Or at this point maybe I should just do the restore, give up on High Sierra altogether, and wait for the next OS. Either way it seems like a restore is the easiest way forward.

I did a backup immediately before upgrading (from El Capitan to High Sierra), and since I haven't even been able to fully start my computer since then I'm obviously not concerned about losing data. I don't mind doing the restore, but it is frustrating and I'm just not sure if it's worth trying to reload the new OS again.

So it's Friday and my MacBook is still stable. I have to say it is nice to have a clean install. I haven't done much yet other than download what I will need such as Virtual Box and Inkscape. I'm starting to move files from the time machine backup. I did check the backups and found the kext files would likely have been put back if I restored from backup, there were 15 old kext files in the backup.

I found this tidbit on Apple developer site regarding kernel programming

"A bug in the kernel could cause random crashes, data corruption, or even render the operating system inoperable. It is even possible for certain errant operations to cause permanent and irreparable damage to hardware, for example, by disabling the cooling fan and running the CPU full tilt."

Which was another symptom of my sick MacBook. When the symptoms first started happening, I had closed the lid, came back a few hours later, heard the fan spinning away, the case was hot to the touch. After that incident, I knew when booting was going to fail when the apple logo appeared on a striped screen, stalled at around 75%, then white screen, fan spinning and hot case.

Hopefully the description of my MacBook symptoms help others on this thread.

Another shout out to John. Great sleuthing skills!

Thanks Faye! Glad it’s finally behaving. I’m going to have to do a bit more sleuthing today, on a 2015 15-inch retina MacBook Pro that was the first machine that I experienced having this issue. I’ll post back if there are any specific kernal extensions that I can pinpoint as potential culprits.

It’s interesting to me that a machine as new as this one exhibits the issue, especially since I don’t believe it was originally set up with a migration from an older machine.

Anyway, I’ll remind everyone to post their experiences on the official Apple Feedback page here:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Cheers,

John

John, Alas, it didn’t last. I came home today, lifted the lid to a black screen. It won’t boot except to single user. At least it lasted a week but I am tired of playing with it. It’s very disturbing that a newer model is exhibiting the same issue. Especially since I have that very model. Thankfully that one seems to be fine. There are no printer kext files in /System/Library/Extensions. I look forward to hearing if you found anything suspicious.

Best,

Faye

Drat, sorry to hear that, Faye! And unfortunately, I'm just getting in deeper and deeper on the 2015 retina MacBook Pro. This afternoon, it appeared that it would regularly boot (reliably) if I booted in Verbose mode with Command-V at startup. Then this evening, even that started to not work every time. I'm really at a loss as to what else to try at this point.

Anyone else have any suggestions?

UPDATE: I'm starting to wonder if this is a hardware issue, rather than a software one, on this 2015 retina MacBook Pro anyway. A couple days ago, I discovered that the machine seemed to boot normally if I used Verbose mode (holding down command-V on startup), while it would freeze when the progress bar was about halfway across if I tried to boot normally. After several tries, however, that stopped working...

Then, this morning, after continuing to disable .kext files last night, and trying repeated reboots without luck, I found that the progress bar would go about a third of the way across, and then the machine would spontaneously reboot. It seemed like it would have repeated that cycle forever if I didn't force a shut down. Note: I was not doing a Safe Boot; I don't know if High Sierra, with its transition to APFS, does a disk check on every startup now, or what, but that sure seems like a red flag. Anyway, after leaving it off for about 15 minutes, I started it up in Verbose mode again, and it fired back up fine.

[I should note that I keep referring to how far the progress bar gets, if only in the hope that it may give a clue to someone more knowledgeable than I. I seem to remember that someone figured out, a few years ago, that the time it takes to march across the screen wasn't/isn't really related to anything about the boot process, but instead is based on how much time it took to boot the last time it booted. I have no clue as the veracity of that claim though, obviously.]

Color me stumped at this point. I'll probably call Apple later today or tomorrow and see if they think it warrants sending in for repair.

I´d really like to follow what you find out about the Macbook Pro 15 Retina Mid 2015.
Experiencing the same issue with boot failing, but after about 50 tries of restarts it starts up with an error message about some kernels being deactivated and a log to be sent to apple(i forgot to save this one). If its helpful i can try reboot and provide this log for you.

I´m clueless when it comes to troubleshooting a mac, but il post my hardware details if it might be helpful

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,5

Processor Name: Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2,8 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 6 MB

Memory: 16 GB

Boot ROM Version: MBP114.0177.B00

SMC Version (system): 2.30f2

You're welcome. I forgot you said you had a Time Machine backup. That's better than nothing! Hope it goes smoothly for you!