I bought my first MacBook back in early 2010. It was spendy, but they had a great reputation and everything was so easy. You know? It just worked.
It kept just working, and I started working with Macs at work as well. Then in 2019 my original MacBook had really reached the end of its life. It could no longer run the OS updates, and was getting slower and slower. I felt 9 years was a pretty good return on investment, so I bought a MacBook Air. I couldn’t justify the money for a MacBook Pro, and in the end went for just the 128GB. I’m old, that still sounds like a LOT of storage!
So anyway, I’ve been ignoring the Big Sur update notification for a while. Normally I’m pretty good about doing my updates, so a couple of weeks ago I went for it. Had to clear a little space for the download, but it still looked like I had a lot of space.
Unfortunately, it seems I got one of the updates that didn’t check whether you had enough space for it to complete before you start. I got stuck in a loop, where I started up, it accepted my password, then died with about 9 minutes remaining. I tried accessing my harddrive by a few different routes, but it was no longer accepting my password, even though it accepted it at the startup/login screen.
This Mr Macintosh post describes the problem in detail. And several options for trying to get out of it. We have 3 other laptops in the house now – my work MacBook Pro, on Catalina, Clarkie’s MacBook Air, on High Sierra, and Clarkie’s work Windows machine. I bought a thunderbolt 3 cable, which only directly links with the Catalina MacBook. Unfortunately, even in target disk mode the hard drive refused to mount. Then we tried a USB cable with adapters to hook it up to Clarkie’s two machines, and nothing happened at all.
This was about a week in. Next trick? I tried an external boot disk with an old USB key that we had. There were promising signs… Right up to the point where I discovered that my machine was new enough to have a secure set up that disallows booting from an external drive. I found another site that suggested single user mode, but again, my oh-so-advanced MacBook doesn’t allow that shortcut either.
I nearly threw things at that point. I really thought I’d have to wipe the machine and start again, which, well, there are photos and music that I would struggle to recover. Anyway, I left the laptop in the corner for the rest of the week, to think about what it’s done.
Today I went back and watched the update video on that Mr Macintosh post, with the updates for accessing via Catalina. As a result, I managed to persuade my hard drive to mount on my work MacBook, from where I could delete the OS partition (eep) and then access the data partition with the password, exactly as I should have been able to throughout. I could then shift enough data to clear up the 45GB(!!) that the update apparently needs, went back through the update, and my MacBook lives! On Big Sur and everything. I’ve learnt a LOT. I am intensely grateful to the hard work from Mr Macintosh too.
Poor show though, Apple. It’s been stressful and difficult, and everything that owning a mac is not supposed to be. I’m not trading it in just yet mind, but I’ll have to keep an eye on it. Also, I reclaimed around 10GB by deleting GarageBand. Who even uses that?!
And I definitely need to set up a backup process!
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