Help - Machine Won't Boot After Attempted Upgrade to High Sierra

[Texangeek]

I hope that someone can help me as I currently have a machine that will not boot as well as a very upset friend who is the owner of the machine.

I attempted to upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra earlier today. I had some issues updating Clover but eventually resolved those and kicked off the upgrade process. The machine booted two or three times but eventually seemed to be in a hung state (screen went black and the HDD light flickered only intermittently. Reluctantly I decided to switch off the machine since the update had been going on for more than two hours.

However I am now unable to boot from the main hard drive nor am I able to access the recovery partition on that drive. I have booted the machine into Sierra using a clone of the hard drive that I made when I first built the machine however I unfortunately do not have a more recent clone. I should note that the Sierra installation identified the machine using the Mac 17,1 (iMac identifier). Note however that I am booting from a hard drive rather than an SSD as would be found in a real 17,1 machine. I didn't explicity specify that the update should not convert the file system as my understanding was that this would not be done for non-SSD systems. I wonder however if the update tried to convert the file system thinking that there must be an SSD present.

Could someone please provide some advice as to the best way to get the machine operating again. Is the recovery partition likely to be in a useful state and, if so, what would I need to do to be able to access it. If I can get to the recovery partition I could do a complete restore of the system from my Time Machine backup. I have mounted the EFI partition on the hard drive and confirmed that the EFI/Clover/Kexts folder contains a copy of the FakeSMC kext. I even tried placing a copy of the latest version (which is presumably compatible with High Sierra) in the folder in the hope that this would allow me to boot to the recovery partition.

Would the other solution be to create a Unibeast Sierra installer and boot from there? However I'm not sure that this would be any better at providing access to the recovery partition or the TM backups than using the clone drive.

Appreciate any guidance that anyone can provide.

 

[AM0207xx]

I hope that someone can help me as I currently have a machine that will not boot as well as a very upset friend who is the owner of the machine.

I attempted to upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra earlier today. I had some issues updating Clover but eventually resolved those and kicked off the upgrade process. The machine booted two or three times but eventually seemed to be in a hung state (screen went black and the HDD light flickered only intermittently. Reluctantly I decided to switch off the machine since the update had been going on for more than two hours.

However I am now unable to boot from the main hard drive nor am I able to access the recovery partition on that drive. I have booted the machine into Sierra using a clone of the hard drive that I made when I first built the machine however I unfortunately do not have a more recent clone. I should note that the Sierra installation identified the machine using the Mac 17,1 (iMac identifier). Note however that I am booting from a hard drive rather than an SSD as would be found in a real 17,1 machine. I didn't explicity specify that the update should not convert the file system as my understanding was that this would not be done for non-SSD systems. I wonder however if the update tried to convert the file system thinking that there must be an SSD present.

Could someone please provide some advice as to the best way to get the machine operating again. Is the recovery partition likely to be in a useful state and, if so, what would I need to do to be able to access it. If I can get to the recovery partition I could do a complete restore of the system from my Time Machine backup. I have mounted the EFI partition on the hard drive and confirmed that the EFI/Clover/Kexts folder contains a copy of the FakeSMC kext. I even tried placing a copy of the latest version (which is presumably compatible with High Sierra) in the folder in the hope that this would allow me to boot to the recovery partition.

Would the other solution be to create a Unibeast Sierra installer and boot from there? However I'm not sure that this would be any better at providing access to the recovery partition or the TM backups than using the clone drive.

Appreciate any guidance that anyone can provide.

PLease provide more information.
Boot with the argument -v. Take a photo where the progress stops and attach it to this post.
Also upload your Clover folder as ZIP, but delete the themes folder before compressing, otherwise the ZIP file is very large and it takes long to upload / download the file.

 

[cmn699]

I hope that someone can help me as I currently have a machine that will not boot as well as a very upset friend who is the owner of the machine.

I attempted to upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra earlier today. I had some issues updating Clover but eventually resolved those and kicked off the upgrade process. The machine booted two or three times but eventually seemed to be in a hung state (screen went black and the HDD light flickered only intermittently. Reluctantly I decided to switch off the machine since the update had been going on for more than two hours.

However I am now unable to boot from the main hard drive nor am I able to access the recovery partition on that drive. I have booted the machine into Sierra using a clone of the hard drive that I made when I first built the machine however I unfortunately do not have a more recent clone. I should note that the Sierra installation identified the machine using the Mac 17,1 (iMac identifier). Note however that I am booting from a hard drive rather than an SSD as would be found in a real 17,1 machine. I didn't explicity specify that the update should not convert the file system as my understanding was that this would not be done for non-SSD systems. I wonder however if the update tried to convert the file system thinking that there must be an SSD present.

Could someone please provide some advice as to the best way to get the machine operating again. Is the recovery partition likely to be in a useful state and, if so, what would I need to do to be able to access it. If I can get to the recovery partition I could do a complete restore of the system from my Time Machine backup. I have mounted the EFI partition on the hard drive and confirmed that the EFI/Clover/Kexts folder contains a copy of the FakeSMC kext. I even tried placing a copy of the latest version (which is presumably compatible with High Sierra) in the folder in the hope that this would allow me to boot to the recovery partition.

Would the other solution be to create a Unibeast Sierra installer and boot from there? However I'm not sure that this would be any better at providing access to the recovery partition or the TM backups than using the clone drive.

Appreciate any guidance that anyone can provide.

• Is the Build in question on a Gigabyte MoBo?
• I have selected a few lines from your post as anchors to see if we can help you with them.

I have booted the machine into Sierra using a clone of the hard drive that I made when I first built the machine however I unfortunately do not have a more recent clone.

• Start re-booting with the above disk connected to the system's SATA Port 0 along with the Failed disk in SATA port 1 and removing all other SATA HDD or SSD and any other USB Storage devices in the USB ports.
• Press the Hotkey and enter BIOS Setup and check Boot Option Priorities and make sure you have only the UEFI SATA HDD with your macOS Sierra Cloned disk and everything else in that list is DISABLED.
• Boot that disk and log on to Desktop
• Click Finder >Preferences [√] Hard Disks [√] External Disks [SEE image]
• Take Screen capture images of
  • Apple>About This Mac > Overview to upload
  • Mount the EFI Partition of the System Disk using Clover Configurator Vibrant DOWNLOAD [See image]
  • Click EFI >EFI>CLOVER >Right-click Compress CLOVER-> Upload to Forum
  • Launch Applications>Utilities>Terminal and execute the following command and screen capture of Terminal to upload

$diskutil list [ENTER]

 

[Texangeek]

• Is the Build in question on a Gigabyte MoBo?
• I have selected a few lines from your post as anchors to see if we can help you with them.

• Start re-booting with the above disk connected to the system's SATA Port 0 along with the Failed disk in SATA port 1 and removing all other SATA HDD or SSD and any other USB Storage devices in the USB ports.
• Press the Hotkey and enter BIOS Setup and check Boot Option Priorities and make sure you have only the UEFI SATA HDD with your macOS Sierra Cloned disk and everything else in that list is DISABLED.
• Boot that disk and log on to Desktop
• Click Finder >Preferences [√] Hard Disks [√] External Disks [SEE image]
• Take Screen capture images of
  • Apple>About This Mac > Overview to upload
  • Mount the EFI Partition of the System Disk using Clover Configurator Vibrant DOWNLOAD [See image]
  • Click EFI >EFI>CLOVER >Right-click Compress CLOVER-> Upload to Forum
  • Launch Applications>Utilities>Terminal and execute the following command and screen capture of Terminal to upload

$diskutil list [ENTER]

Guys

Many thanks for the quick responses provided above. I don't have access to the failed machine at present however I will upload the requested information tomorrow.

In response to HorchaudiBMW's question, the machine uses an ASRock H170M-ITX motherboard (see my build signature). Also, a quick clarification regarding the clone that I used to boot the machine. It is a USB drive and hence can't be connected to SATA Port 0 as requested. The 'failed drive' is an internal drive most likely on SATA Port 0.

 

[cmn699]

Guys

Many thanks for the quick responses provided above. I don't have access to the failed machine at present however I will upload the requested information tomorrow.

In response to HorchaudiBMW's question, the machine uses an ASRock H170M-ITX motherboard (see my build signature). Also, a quick clarification regarding the clone that I used to boot the machine. It is a USB drive and hence can't be connected to SATA Port 0 as requested. The 'failed drive' is an internal drive most likely on SATA Port 0.

Also, a quick clarification regarding the clone that I used to boot the machine. It is a USB drive and hence can't be connected to SATA Port 0 as requested. The 'failed drive' is an internal drive most likely on SATA Port 0.

That is a real problem. Cloning to work properly has to be SATA to SATA as the file transfer speed will be different from SATA to USB or in reverse and possibility of file corruption quite high.

I have serious concerns in getting the failed disk back into its previous OS or fixing the failed HS system. I guess you may end up doing a fresh installation with a new macOSHigh Sierra USB installer created in a working Hack or Mac by reformatting the disk if it has not already sustained any serious Filesystem damage from Power interruption that might need hours or even days of "Filesystem Repair and Recovery".

 

[Texangeek]

So would your advice be to start from scratch rather than spending time attempting to get back to the Sierra installation or making the HS one work.

Note that the internal drive is not failed as such. I can see and read files on it when the machine is booted with the usb clone.

 

[cmn699]

So would your advice be to start from scratch rather than spending time attempting to get back to the Sierra installation or making the HS one work.

Note that the internal drive is not failed as such. I can see and read files on it when the machine is booted with the usb clone.

In my opinion, you may save a lot of time and avoid frustration by attempting a clean install rather than trying to fix a corrupt disk through a Sierra System disk that boots only via USB.

 

[Texangeek]

Once I have a working version of HS I assume that I will be able to restore the Users folder from my TM backup? I will however require to download and install third party apps that I previously had on the machine. Or can these also be restored from the TM backup?

Really appreciate your insight and guidance.

 

[Texangeek]

One further thought. Would it be useful to have a backup of the config.plist that is currently on the /EFI partition to use as guide for final configuration of the machine.

Also, I spent a fair amount of time in tuning the USB ports on Sierra and ended up excluding certain ports in order to stay within the port limit. Can I simply set the same “exclude” parameters for booting with HS?

Thanks