Boot failure after High Sierra Update

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

Update: my iMac (around 2014) is back ... but to the cost of using a complete Time Machine restore (my fault of course, 15 days old, but I do not use the iMac professionally).

As soon as i was online again, iMac said he wanted to install a safety update and a few minutes after it simply installed it, no question asked. Now I remember that was the last thing happened before "the black out". Could there be a connection?

I have not dared yet to shut down and restart. I will update again if it happens again.

But ... sorry dear Apple... I have to say this is not what I expect from you.

I switched over from Windows three years ago, but something like this never happened to me since I use computers (and it is a while :-).

Anyway, thanks to the forum and especially to TracyJr for the help. It is really appreciated.

Regards

Claudio

How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support
Cheers.

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.

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!

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

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.

I'm having the same problem. I've gone to the Genius Bar and all they can tell me is that they have to delete all my files to downgrade my [supposedly compatible] mid-2010 macBook Pro back to regular Sierra. There is a build error in the OS and the file system isn't working. All we can hope for is a better build of the OS.

Have done verbose boot on late 2012 iMac and see exactly same as CSerpent except system will boot up.

Doing a normal boot process runs to about 2/3 >> go black screen for 2 to 5 seconds >> screen comes back normal and finishes to login screen. Total boot up time 62 seconds Rotational HD HFS+ format. All this on Erase and reinstall 10.13.1 from USB installer. Do not have this experience on Sierra 10.12.6. Hoping 10.13.2 fixes

I have only done a TimeMachine Restore once in all my years.

That said, it (TM) did erase the entire internal HD or SSD and restored ALL files ( macOS and any personal files) corresponding to the date and time of that TM Backup.

Thanks P. Philipps! That is what I feared. So I will have to try to reinstall the “oldest” macOS available for my device. Or wait an update of High Sierra that solves the problem (my Time Machine is about 15 days old... no big deal but I keep that as the really last option).

But let me say... Seems Apple did a remarkable bug into High Sierra! I wouldn’t have believed it possible. The machine became unusable!

Anyway thanks

Best regards

Cla