Mojave upgrade failed, disk locked, cannot log in

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Mojave upgrade failed, disk locked, cannot log in

Hi,

Just tried to upgrade from the latest HighSierra to Mojave. I had over 40Gb of free disk space and all latest updates installed. After the first phase was completed, it tried to reboot and shortly after I got a message, something like "upgrade failed, unable to remove the existing OS" or something similar. Should have taken a picture probably...Anyway, there was one option - restart. After restart I am being prompted for my password and the system does not recognize it. I am 110% confident that I typed it right. It also offered to use the recovery code and I have the code on the paper...still, does not work. Tried to boot to recovery mode, tried to unlock the disk from there - does not work.

It is a first time Mac OS upgrade actually did screw up my system completely.

I do have a relatively recent time machine backup...looks like it will be time to try it.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6)

Posted on Oct 14, 2018 7:45 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 25, 2018 10:07 PM in response to nik_qc

It seems your disk became corrupted and required reformatting. That’s why the disk locked. To unlock the drive

Start your Mac in Recovery Mode
Launch Terminal
Type mount -uw /
Press Enter
Quit Terminal and Restart your Mac

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Answer 2

nik_qc Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 17, 2018 6:52 PM in response to nik_qc

Update. I am not in big rush to recover my Mac because I have another one for work. So I have decided to try to see what can be done.

First, it seems I can actually unlock FileVault-encrypted APFS disk. I tried diskUtil and it does unlock the drive - but it fails to mount it. Actually I can unlock it with both user/password and recovery key. "fsck" also fail on it, but this is where I am not sure - my APFS volume is shown as "FileVault: Yes (Unlocked)". The disk is disk2s1.

Most importantly, I tried to run a tool called Disk Drill just for fun. It was able to open my disk and it seems to be able to recover at least some real files that I did have on the disk. Which means that the decryption indeed works, otherwise I would not see a thing. So...maybe I am not that far from the solution.

Either I am not mounting the volume properly or it is really corrupted by the installer to certain extent. I believe that Disk Drill just scans the entire raw device (rdisk2, I suppose) block by block and attempts to reconstruct what it finds. But, in fact, if I can boot in recovery mode, it means that the APFS container is not really damaged.

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Mojave upgrade failed, disk locked, cannot log in

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