Boot failure after High Sierra Update

What happens if this is the case?

Hi P. Phillips,

In response to your question In my case I did have a sd card at the time. Is there a fix for that?

Both my iMacs 27” (2011 and 2012) failed to boot after High Sierra update. I’m livid! Both hard drives failed for whatever reason. My iPhone 6 has gone bonkers too after the last few updates.

Scared. I've stored thousands of my family photos on my Mac mini. And now their solution is to reformat the disk? A bigger sucker than windows vista.

Agreed :-) 200% !

I'm having the same problem.
Any news?
Any chances to have it fixed without restoring from TimeMachine?

Thank you so much, Olaf. That worked for me.

You're welcome. Glad to hear, this works for you, too.

I like that you tell Apple you are ordering a new iMac :-)

That will surely motivate Apple to do better.

Have a nice day

Regards

Claudio

Sounds good Faye! Keep us posted on its behavior going forward...

In my case, after the restore from Time Machine, I finally shut down and restarted (now two times) with no problems for the moment. I wish to underline that the restore was to High Sierra (I chose the last backup I did, and I did it a few days after "successfully" ;-) migrating to High Sierra.

If it happens again, I'll try your "workaround"... actually I would say I already tried it, thinking about it. Because to shut down the iMac when it was stuck I did press and hold the Power On. But the only thing that happened was that the iMac shut down. To restart I had to press Power On again, and it would take again forever to reach the end of the progress bar, and then stay there.

Best regards

Claudio

After spending 6+ hours attempting all sorts of fixes, I gave up on High Sierra and restored from Time Machine.

As lousy as their new OS has been, Apple's Time Machine is still the best backup solution I have seen for consumer and prosumer environments.

TM Restore had to be done from the Safe Boot menu, which was complicated because the bottom half of the screen was corrupted and unreadable. Thankfully I found a guide online with screen shots, so I was able to guess where to click even tho I couldn't see the buttons (gee, thanks Apple, for not allowing the restore windows to be re-positioned).

Now that it's been restored, the Mini is working fine. But there is no way I will attempt a High Sierra install again. I'll wait until the next major release, and hope that Apple's software quality control improves. Who knows? By then, they might actually release a new Mac Mini!

I thought this information might be useful for some looking for answers on this issue. I'm in a business environment supporting several Macs. Our Mac users usually do TM backups, but this particular user didn't get the proverbial memo.

I found this method of making a backup copy of the hard drive to an external drive useful:

Mac wont boot after successful High Sierra install *https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8132544*

This thread has instructions for restoring your hard drive as a source to an external drive target using Disk Utility in Recovery mode. This allows you to have a copy of the hard drive to at least salvage some files from it. It is essentially a clone of the original hard drive, and I even tried booting from the copy by changing the startup disk to the external drive afterward (just trying everything possible) and it behaved the exact same way. (BTW I used a larger external drive, it doesn't need to be the exact same size as your Mac hard drive.)

When you connect the external drive to your rebuilt Mac, you will be able to browse the external drive and pull back files you need to recover (I'm assuming that it will require High Sierra to read the drive if the HS file system is different from previous versions). It doesn't resolve the rebuild issue, but at least you can recover some files from the original hard drive and put them back afterward.

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???