Boot failure after High Sierra Update

So, I’m the guy. I have no time machine backup and no other macs in the house. I have my data backed up in Google so tried to do clean install of high Sierra, still only get white screen of death.

Running MacBook Pro early 2011.

I have the dvd that came with it...Snow Leopard. I was able to get that installed and working after holding option then holding Shift and selecting the dvd. Which is crazy but worked.

I am now stuck as snow leopard is unsupported by many apps. I tried several other version installs, Lion and El Capitan and Sierra (which is what I originally had) and get the same white screen.

No startup key combos work after white screen. Of death. Not recovery, safe mode, etc??

I feel very strongly this has to do with Video Firmare but have not seen anything that may be able to fix it. Back to snow leopard and tried EFI, SMC, and other firmware updates. All say incompatible with this device.

I don’t even want to admit how many hours, days I have spent on this. If it comes down to new computer... will be windows. Never reached a point where I could not fix, even it it meant reinstallation of OS.

Really shook my confidence in Apple. Also have iPhone 8 that seems to have numerous little quirks...text messaging freezing keyboard over last message received, etc. what is going on, did they lay off the QC department?? I was so hoping to get a new iPad this year... but now hate to think it may be riddled with issues???

Hi Airjarvis,

I’m somehow happy that someone like me posts his disappointment. I have no IT department behind me and have only one Mac with one disk. If you look the other thread about “too many corpses being created” (! Love that message too!) you will see that the remedies that have been advised go far over the average competence of the average user. Certainly too much for me.

Probably this message will be deleted, but do you know what I think?

Apple couldn’t care less!

(Irony ON) Based also on the impressive response to this cry for help (irony OFF). Their target customer is one buying a new Mac every year or two. And every new iPhone generation of course.

And: they have such a customer base, more than enough! That’s just OUR problem that we are not willing to do this.

By my Mac after Time Machine restore to High Sierra the problem has not come again. But that doesn’t mean anything because I was already in High Sierra since about two weeks when it happened. With average 4-5 starts per week.

So theoretically it could happen again anytime.

Good luck

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.

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.

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.

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.

John,

Thanks for a great post. I have been suffering with an amost dead MacBook Pro 17” early 2011. I don’t have extensive knowledge of Mac OS but had a decent amount of Unix administration maybe 25 yrs ago. I knew it had something to do with file incompatibility, watching the messages booting in single user mode. My hardware is fine. I was able to boot after running fsck a few times. Never consistently though. I had been trying to boot in recovery mode without success. I did find around 10-20 kext folders associated with a hp printer I no longer have. However, I was not able to remove or move them either at a system level, in terminal or Finder. I figured if I had to get rid of these files I needed to rebuild from the ground up. A few more reboots and fsck and I got into recovery mode. Before reinstalling High Sierra, I erased the disk. I wanted to make sure I was wiping out those files. I did this last night. It awoke from sleep with no issue this morning. I am going to reinstall all of the software I use, and only move files from the timemachine backup as needed. I am not going to restore from backup and reintroduce the kext files. I will post if it crashed when I return home today, but this is at least the most concrete possible solution I have seen so far.

Thanks 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!

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.