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Mojave -> Catalina upgrade - "Macintosh HD - Data" partition?

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Why is my upgrade from Mojave to Catalina consistently failing and leaving me with two unbootable volumes, "Macintosh HD" and "Macintosh HD - Data"?
in what way failing? we are not mind readers....
 
* I made a bootable clone of my Mojave (10.14.6) startup drive and am running the upgrade on the clone.
* Using latest version of Catalina installer 10.15.7.03.
* Made a bootable USB stick with Unibeast then copied the EFI folder (Clover 5119) to the clone drive's EFI partition and confirmed it boots Mojave, pre-update.

I tried every variation of installing to the cloned disk - booted from the clone, booted from the original disk, booted from the USB installer. I also tried wiping the clone and just doing a clean install.

In EVERY case, when I try to boot, I get a flicker during the progress bar, then the screen goes dark and simply hangs. When I reboot from the original Mojave partition, I see a non-merged pair of partitions, "Clone" and "Clone - Data".

I've tried using stock Clover kexts and drivers from Unibeast installer, have also tried bringing over appropriate/updated kexts and drivers from my previous EFI folder. I've just started reading about EC and have not tried anything related to that yet.
 
Should the drive "Clone" and "Clone - Data" partitions appear as separate volumes when booted from a pre-Catalina OS? Is that the new "normal"?

It looks like the two volumes are what I should expect to see - the boot volume contains minimal system files and the data volume contains everything else.

It would help if I could confirm whether the install process completed correctly, and now I have a boot issue, i.e. kext, driver, etc.
 
Should the drive "Clone" and "Clone - Data" partitions appear as separate volumes when booted from a pre-Catalina OS? Is that the new "normal"?

It looks like the two volumes are what I should expect to see - the boot volume contains minimal system files and the data volume contains everything else.

It would help if I could confirm whether the install process completed correctly, and now I have a boot issue, i.e. kext, driver, etc.
boot verbose to see a possible issue
 
This looks like filesystem is not good. It’s halting and doing a hard shutdown.
1641061742587.png
 
How did you make your "clone"?

There are various ways this can break macOS due to Catalina APFS installs having been migrated to the Sealed System Volume, which places the installation in an APFS container and divides the installation into a pair of partitions: "Macintosh HD" and "Macintosh HD - Data". The first one is the SSV, a crypto sealed form of the stuff (roughly) thought of as protected by SIP, but this isn't controlled by SIP; it can't be changed outside of a process running code that is authenticated all the way to Apple certificates. The "Data" part is where Apple apps that can be updated incrementally go, plus all the user data, and 3rd party apps. These two area are combined using black-magic of APFS firm-links, which present a namespace that looks like a single volume.

These two parts have to stay in sync or trouble ensues. A special Apple tool called APFS Replicator can clone the whole shebang, and as long as no Apple updates are applied. APFS Replicator requires erasing the target drive.

For a source and a backup at a given fixed version of macOS, the source Data part can be incrementally updated and copied to the matching backup drive, and the backup will work. But if any system SW update is applied the the source drive, this resets the seal and the only way to update the full system backup is using APFS Replicator, which necessitates erasing the backup. If only the Data partition is cloned to the backup, the linkage between the Data part and the clone SSV ends up out of sync and trouble ensues.

For these reasons and more, traditional incremental cloning can't work. A full block-level copy of the entire drive can work because it doesn't disturb the crypto seal. — I am massively waving my hands here; I'm not an expert and I may be wrong on this last point because Apple has been doing a lot of work on this over the last year, but you get the gist. WARNING: When using a block-level clone, I have seen Disk Utility get wildly confused about which part goes with which drive's macOS container volume, presumably because UUIDs are being reused... Fair warning about data loss due to such a mess.

This is why a recommended approach to system maintenance is to install macOS then use Migration Assistant to merge your data.

Your screen shot shows that the volume is ok, so please review your approach to cloning.

One more thing, after a APFS Replicator clone, renaming the target volume doesn't update a key file used by bootloaders to present the volume name in the boot list, so if the source and clone are attached at the same time you can't tell which is which because the clone had the old name. I can post the fix if anyone cares.
 
@c-o-pr, I'm creating the clone by first initializing the drive as an APFS volume with GUID Partition Map using Disk Utility. Then I'm copying the source Mojave volume using Carbon Copy Cloner v5. I've also cloned using ChronoSync v4.9.13 backups software. Both methods create an "identical", bootable clone of the original volume and I've confirmed that both methods are bootable into Mojave after cloning, but neither method has produced a successful upgrade to Catalina.

Are you talking about cloning a Catalina volume, or do your comments apply to any APFS volume including those made and/or cloned under Mojave?

> This is why a recommended approach to system maintenance is to install macOS then use Migration Assistant to merge your data.

Then I should be able to do a clean install of Catalina to a newly-initialized volume. I've also tried this, without success, but I will try once more. It makes me wonder if the Catalina installer version (15.7.03) might be an issue, and maybe I should try with an earlier version.
 
I've newly-initialized the target volume as APFS/GUID Partition Map in Disk Utility, and I have a bootable Catalina USB stick made with Unibeast 10.3.0. I'm disconnecting all other drives, so the only visible volumes are the USB stick and the target volume. I'll try to do a clean install of Catalina and will return with the results.
 
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