Boot failure after High Sierra Update

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

First off, as anyone who has spent any time perusing the message boards here knows, Apple DOES NOT officially monitor these forums at all. Posting comments like "Apple, why aren't you doing something about this??" will do nothing but spur some of the more experienced folks here to chide you about it. What we all need to do, when we experience issues such as this, is post them on Apple's feedback pages: https://apple.com/feedback. And for this issue, use the page specific to 'macOS': Feedback - macOS - Apple

FYI, I'm a small-time Apple-specific computer consultant in SW Colo. I've been making a living working on Macs for close to 15 years, and while completely self-taught, I think I've gotten very good at troubleshooting, and fixing, all manner of issues that come my way. That said, I would never call myself an 'expert' in anything related to computers. "Experienced", yes, but far from an expert.

I discovered this issue, and the many threads regarding it (not just here either), due to several machines that came to me for attention just this week. When I started to uncover what appears to be the depth and breadth of the problem, I became very concerned, primarily because I've been advising my clients to go ahead and make the leap to High Sierra since the 10.13.3 update came out. [In my experience, the 10.x.3 update is usually the minimum version I think we have to wait for before upgrading to a new OS.] So if this issue hits even a significant portion of my clients, I'm going to be hearing from a lot of upset folks.

Anyway, tonight I started digging into anything that seemed to be a common thread. One that rose to the top was that there must be an incompatibility between a kernel extension and High Sierra, that's somehow specific to older machines. So, on a test machine that exhibited the issue, I booted from an external device, dug into /System/Library/Extensions, and sorted them by creation date. There were only about a half dozen that were created prior to 2017, most of them printer-related, so I created a new folder named "Extensions(disabled)", and moved those older extension into that folder. I rebooted to the internal drive, and... bang! ...the issue went away.

While I obviously realize that this is far from a definitive (let alone scientific or possibly even reproducible) solution, I think it clearly points out the probability/likelihood that it IS an incompatible kernel extension that's at fault.

I thought I should post this as soon as I could, just to get the info out there, incomplete as it is, in the hopes that someone more experienced than I could test the theory further. I apologize that I don't have a list of the specific extensions I disabled, but I had a client waiting the take his machine home, and I didn't think about posting this until after he'd left.

For what it's worth, this was on a 13-inch, Early 2011, MacBook Pro, that was hanging when the progress bar reached about halfway. I could not get it to boot normally at all, though I did boot from my external "rescue" disk, run Disk Utility, and it found no issues. And while a Safe Boot wouldn't complete either, I did boot into Single User Mode, where it also found no issues. After disabling that older group of kexts, I rebooted the machine repeatedly, installed the 10.13.3 Supplemental Update, and it rebooted cleanly every time.

Hope this helps start us on the road to a solution, somehow. And don't forget to report your experiences at Feedback - macOS - Apple

Sigh... The tech world seems to be getting wackier by the day, but I still enjoy trying to help people figure it all out!

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!

Hi

I tried all the methods suggested. The first time this happened with my Mac pro (mid 2012) I reinstalled OS and I was told my Mac isn't compatible and it got downgraded to sierra automatically. The second time nothing worked. Took it to icare (India), they deleted all my data and reinstalled El Capitan. So basically my Mac isn't compatible with high sierra. Be prepared to lose all your data if you have no backup. There is no other solution as far as I can tell apart from downgrading OS....