Beware of latest Mac OS update

[Rick Kirchner]

For all the mac guys out there, thought I'd share my recent experience.

BLUF: skip the latest MacOS upgrade.

I have a 2019 Intel Macbook Pro set up with a Mac partition, a bootcamp partition to run windows for the AIM system, and a large FAT32 partition for all of my data so I can access it from either OS. Worked pretty well except for losing some functionality on Mac-based software (photos uses the extended address space to catalog your stuff, I lost all of that transferring them into FAT-32 so I have 15,000 pics only sorted by date).

Before this Mac I had a 2008 iMac, and older ones from 1990 until about 2000 when my wife decided that she was tired of having one thing at work and another at home, so for a brief time I ran PCs (a desktop, a laptop for my daughter, and a netbook for my race usage with AIM). At work I still used high-end Macs until the Navy lost its mind and transitioned to PCs only back in 2003.

While I had PCs, to quote an old Mac commercial, I was "a repairman in my own home". For the entire time using Macs (29-ish years?) I had not.one.single.problem.

Until last Monday.

Before bed I finally clicked on the update notification and went to bed. Woke up, found a login error screen - something related to not being able to log in to a web service for software I'd recently downloaded. Couldn't clear that, so I used the emergency account. Once in, things just looked - strange. took me several minutes to realize that it had overwritten all the partitions. There was an icon for bootcamp in the finder, but no partition to support it. And all of my data was gone.

Now I had a backup disk - because of the fat-32 partition I just drag and drop onto a seagate 3TB drive. I've tried to use Time Machine and find it a bit of a PITA compared to Windows and it's random "go back" points (which I've had to use on several occasions). Not only that, but a drag and drop is OS agnostic. However, the updated OS would not recognize my backup disk at all.

From a racing standpoint the good news is that most of my racing files had recently been transferred to my race laptop, which is what I'm using now until the MAC comes back from the shop. On a PC, the tech would have just removed the hard drive, put it on another system and dug into the file system. Unfortunately, modern Macs have the hard drive soldered in - and not the easy soldering either - vapor phase re-flow - takes a special Apple facility to remove a Macbook hard drive - and a significant chunk of change.

Took it in on a Wednesday, heard nothing since. to some degree I figured no news is good news, because it take over 12 hours sometimes to copy these large drives. On the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion I'm screwed. Don't know what the story is with the backup drive.

Since then I've been prowling places like the Mac sub-Reddit, and there was a lot of complaining a few months back about how buggy this update is. Then my wife was talking to her Brother-in-law, who was an IT professional for Cummins before retirement - and he experienced THE SAME THING.

Verizon.net e-mail is through my phone now, as the PC resists any and all efforts to establish a Pop-3 or IMAP account. I used my e-mail as a file system for everything, contacts, warranties, billing, etc - all gone - nearly a TB of stuff going back to 2003 - which was the last time I had a large windows crash that took everything out.

[DaveW]

"BLUF" meaning for those like me a bit out of touch...

BLUF (bottom line up front) is the practice of beginning a message with its key information (the "bottom line"). This provides the reader with the most important information first. By extension, that information is also called a BLUF.

And I thought MAC's were more user friendly than Windows PC's.

[E1pix]

Oh Man, Rick, I know exactly how you feel!

I don’t know if any of this will help, but…

The only luck I’ve ever had with things like this is by using bootable backups of my system files. By design, IMO, Apple has built-in “permission preventions” that prevent some critical system files from using Drag and Drop. I had a crash maybe a year ago, plugged in the bootable, and my system was right back where it was the last time I’d backed it up. This was a first after using only Mac since 1988.

I, too have found Time Machine to be *utterly useless* — despite wasting $500 on the dedicated Apple drive, and instead use SuperDuper! to do my bootable backups.

I suspect yours can be resurrected. Frankly, I find that industry to be borderline corrupt in pricing and methodology, but if important enough it’s possible you can get back where you were.

Are you sure the data’s gone, or that the OS just doesn’t recognize the hierarchy or structure?

My MO is to buy a new computer, update everything, and never update again. Sometimes that bites me, but it’s worked okay and beats issues like this.

Someone I’d trusted with my laptop after it was damaged in a total-loss van crash in 2018 hacked my GoDaddy, and wiped out 19 years of emails. The only reason some segments were preserved were because I only use Apple Mail as my real backup, and refuse to do email online. In my case, one multi-year segment that was erased and not backed up was to serve as accurate, time-stamped events for a novel I was to write, and now likely won’t. So I get it.

GoDaddy went to a new email method a year ago (Exchange) that wouldn’t accommodate POP or IMAP. I spent hours of heart attacks with GoDaddy, the whole time them blaming Mac. The ONLY way I was able to get it to work was by buying a newer, used laptop whose OS is about 18 months old, instead of my work laptop using older software I use everyday and I REFUSE to replace owned apps with subscription-based versions. This won’t last forever but does for now.

I’d share my settings on a phone call if you wanna try. It indeed does work now, and it’s all in Apple Mail as I like.

For way over a decade I had software to auto back-up everything to three drives, three times a day. But living on the road now doesn’t have that luxury for a variety of logistical reasons.

So far as your photos, cataloging those is right up my alley, and if interested I’d share a numbering system I’ve developed since 1991 @ No Charge. If using something like Lightroom (recommended!), despite being 15,000 images you could have those archived so well you’d find any image in seconds from here on out.

I’m reasonably confident there’s a solution for you on the system resurrection, and for your sake hope I’m right.

Good Luck.

[Rick Kirchner]

Eric - the "bootable backup" was a strategy I used on Windows machines - one OS partition, ghost the clean OS to a second partition, and a data partition. Data being separate from the OS keeps it from being corrupted by an OS fault. When the OS crumped, I'd just boot into the setup, change the boot partition to the unused OS, and continue. Then you re-format the corrupted partition, ghost the current OS back on it, and you're ready for the next failure.

Dave - Macs are MUCH more user friendly and fault tolerant than PCs. This is literally the first time I've had an issue with one, and I suppose familiarity breeds contempt - I never had to develop a failure strategy like I did with Windows machines, and got complacent.

[E1pix]

“Ready for the next failure.”

That made me laugh. But dead-on accurate, not funny but all one can do sometimes…

Yes, my bootable backups include current works in progress, but exclude rotating non-work stuff like movies, etc.

All my data archives get burned to a second drive entirely, 5gb. I have three matched copies of both drives, plus a pair of drives of only movies. Eight total.

Do you have any confidence of getting anything back?

Hang in there.

[DanW]

"Ready for the next failure" made me rethink my existing backup strategy.

[Rick Kirchner]

So five minutes ago, I'm reading the NYT on my racing PC, and boom - blue screen of death, something about a memory addressing issue, and the machine re-starts.

Last year I took this machine to an IT guy because a windows update had failed halfway through, and even using the "back" feature left some aspect of it damaged such that it was very unstable. I also had a 1TB solid state drive I had removed from my old iMac before recycling it, so I had him install that along with a clean OS. The solid-state drive doesn't seem to be compatible with all the extra Dell bits that came with the machine that you never seem to be able to get rid of, so I get the occasional message that my hard drive is failing....

if i had to guess, this machine has maybe 40 hours of use on it since that service, and part of the time was spent using the "back" feature to get rid of an automatic Windows 11 install that I neither wanted nor needed.

[E1pix]

Try cleaning the P-RAM, it clears out any corrupted or excessive memory like nothing else I’ve tried.

Example:
Running a huge photo file (2-3 gb) I’d get a freeze, or what you described, and a reboot.

Look up the keys to make sure! I *think* it’s simultaneous Apple-Option-P-R keys held down right as shutdown darkens the screen *just before* it restarts.

If too late, try again. Hold all four down, you can hear some strange disc noises, after about three seconds it’ll re-boot and chime again. Once is probably complete but sometimes I do it twice in a row just to make sure.

Motherboard springs to mind here, too, no data should be lost but you might race out to buy more drives!

On bootables, they should match your hard drive’s capacity size — not larger as one might presume.

[alangbaker]

Speaking as one who does tech support for a living:

Never do an OS update without being sure you have a known-good backup of EVERYTHING.

[Rick Kirchner]

Try cleaning the P-RAM, it clears out any corrupted or excessive memory like nothing else I’ve tried.

This is on my temporary Windows machine

[Peter Olivola]

One of the features of MacOS is that it's based on Unix. Since Unix has a history of self corruption over time, it's reasonable to take the same precautions industrial strength Unix environments do. That is a cold reboot at least every two weeks. While it may be too late in this situation it's something to keep in mind going forward.

[E1pix]

This is on my temporary Windows machine

Oh Geez Rick, Sorry, I missed something here!

[Rick Kirchner]

Thought I'd provide a little update:

A few days after the failure, took it to a recommended shop in Bakersfield. Two days and the guy got nowhere. He suggested a data recovery service in Silicon Valley - $450 min, likely more than $4000 IF they could recover the data. This usually doesn't require a lot of hands on work - they have processes, but the whole industry is based on what you are willing to pay to get your data back, as opposed to the amount of actual hourly work done to retrieve it. Through the whole ordeal every experienced Mac guy said "interesting - that's not supposed to happen" followed by - "but if it does happen you're ****ed".

So, I brought it home and started to tinker. Using the Emergency account I was able to get in and delete the service that was preventing me from getting to login - and then it wouldn't let me log in. If you are familiar with the mac user interface, when you enter a bad password the box sort of "shakes it's head" . I went into my iPhone and using another apple service, changed the password and somehow managed to get the login to stop shaking me off - it accepted the password - and then couldn't log me in.

This of course, was because some part of the OS "knew" my account was on the FAT32 drive, which was "gone" so no account, no login.

At this point I took my backup drive and the machine to a local place. He verified that the data on my backup was good - all my e-mail and photos were there in mac libraries. So as a last resort, I was only going back to December. Then we started to play around with the Mac.

The tech ran a "properties" on the drive and came up with 200 Gig -which he thought was OK, because some versions of this Mac came with 200 gig. and I pointed out that this was waaaaay off - it had a 2TB drive. After some additional work, we realized that the Fat32 partition and the bootcamp partition were still there, but the OS couldn't see them. It could only see the original 200 Gig Mac partition.

After some more "playing around' using disk recovery tools suddenly both partitions appeared on the desktop! We went in, verified that everything was there, and then I tried to start mail to see if wit would find my mail file system - which hung for some reason. after a re-boot, it all disappeared again.

it stayed gone for a week while we tried a number of things including something called 'target mode" where you can make the hard drive of one mac show up on the desktop of another mac that's functioning properly. Even tried a clean install on the Mac OS partition, no joy.

So on Tuesday I decided to concede, told the tech to re-image everything and then use my backup drive to put my data back where it needed to be - and then for reasons neither of us understood again, the drive showed up again. This time we copied it off to an external, then re-built the system from scratch. Monday I pick it up, hopefully, as good as new.

Neither he, me, or the Mac wizards I used to work with have any idea of what went on.

[E1pix]

None of the tech we rely on actually, reliably works. And only the factory techs know how it does — if they even do.

Data recovery is often a borderline criminal enterprise unless one finds one with honor… a Tech friend uses a good one in Dallas.

It still sounds like a failing motherboard to me. Hope it all works out.

[chrisw52]

well that sucks very hard... Sorry to hear.

your problem is that intel based Mac, not the OS. With Apples move off of the Intel hardware, support for these older machine is haphazard now. That unfortunately includes bootcamp. Bootcamp is unsupported on the new architecture, so your existing setup will not work moving forward.

Instead of bootcamp, you will need to use a hosted virtual machine (parallels, VMWare fusion) but even then you might need an Arm version of windows to install


Now on your old machine that you managed to recover.... What kind of hard drive does it have? does it have one of those fusion drives? that crappy combo of SSD and old platter tech. I had one of those in my last intel based Mac and when those hard drives fail, random schiett can happen. If you have one of those drives in your machine(s) get rid of it ASAP. When they go you're toast there is zero chance of recovery.

good luck!

there might be more options over on IFixit https://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_16%22_2019

[Rick Kirchner]

Yes, its a fusion drive (I think). I'll do a properties on it when I get it back. I don't think a real SSD was available in 2TB capacity

Can't change it, its soldered in.

I don't mind them discontinuing support. I can just turn off updates or reject them all and live fat dumb and happy for many years to come. Now that I have two large-capacity hard dives I can do a lot of interesting things with time machine and ghosting to make sure I don't have this issue again. I expect this thing to last at least another 5 years.

I have a copy of Parallels - an old one a friend gave me. Don't know its compatibility with either the current MacOS or Windows 10. Perhaps running Win 10 in a virtual machine will prevent the damn thing from trying to upgrade to Win 11 every chance it gets.