<< Solved >> Old System: Using SSD Causes Reboot, non-SSD Drives Work - Catalina

[greenfrog5]

While I agree that I have not conclusively demonstrated the SSDs are not at fault, I have several reasons to believe they are unlikely to be the issue.
- My old SSD ran Yosemite without issue. I successfully installed and ran Catalina on a non-SSD. I cloned this working system to the SSD and it immediately started freezing. Booting and running Catalina on the SSD in a USB dock did not cause freezing. Returning it to the SATA port caused freezing.
- I purchased a new SSD and it experienced the same freezing behavior on a clean Catalina install. I have not tried booting this new drive in the USB dock, but I wouldn't be surprised if it behaves similarly (no freezing via USB). I will try this as I have time. I am also going to clone this SSD install back to a non-SSD and see if that runs properly again.

I have swapped all the SATA data cables and ports. I haven't tested different power cables, but I will add that to my list to try.

What would be the best way to test the SSDs to conclusively rule them out as the problem? I am eventually going to install Windows on my old SSD, but it has High Sierra right now and I want to keep that for testing purposes.

I will be back with new information after further testing... Freezes offten occur at ~2.5h, and as long as 24h+ so 'testing' is generally slow going for meaningful results. I have run smoothly for 48h on a few occasions, but rebooting the same setup has caused freezes again, so it must be a random timing, or fluke type thing.

As always, thanks for your continued assistance. I'm sure you are at least as annoyed with my problem as I am by now.

 

[greenfrog5]

As mentioned in my HDD -50 thread, I have reverted to High Sierra installed on my older SSD for testing. It is running without freezes. This system initially experienced a 30-min freeze that I was eventually able to track to 'put HDD to sleep when possible'. Disabling this fixed that issue, and the High Sierra system has run for 6-24h a few times without any issues. I expect it will run stable, without freezes.

At least this verifies that my general hardware and BIOS seems to be ok (except the new SSD, TBD). I think I should try putting Catalina onto the (now-verified-to-work) old-SSD as another test. I know that I actually updated the old-SSD firmware last time I was working through this (circa 2020), as it was a known issue (but that did not fix all of my issues at the time). I think I checked the new-SSD firmware when I got it and it was current, but I can't actually remember.

What else does this OS-dependent freeze issue point to for additional troubleshooting or testing? I was also going to try cloning Catalina onto a non-SSD drive, as I was able to run that in the past without freezes too (but it was difficult to get to boot in Clover).

 

[greenfrog5]

Long story short:
- High Sierra seemed to work without freezes for a while.
- I started installing a few software; security, online backup.
- I started cloning data to my externals to update my backups.
- I eventually 'broke' the High Sierra installation. It started freezing when pushing the hard disks (clone + online + copy). Eventually, it couldn't run from a fresh boot for more than 30-45 mins.
- I erased and restored from a fresh-installed-clone of HS. This couldn't see a lot of my SATA drives. I installed AppleAHCIPort to \L\E\ which fixed this (it seems).
- So far, this new/clean HS with AHCI seems to be working pretty well. No freezes yet with limited testing.

I have tried some EHCI patches that go along with AHCIPort for HS - not sure what is needed, or what does/doesn't work.

Catalina (after the erase/restore of HS)
- HDDs that previously worked 'most' of the time in Catalina are generally no longer visible. There are I/O Errors in boot log, similar to HS previously, but now every boot in Catalina.
- I think I need to replicate the AHCIPort fix on Catalina, but am unsure how. I see this: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/ich10-patch-for-appleahciport-on-catalina-10-15-2.291874/, but I don't think I have an ICH10 SATA chip.
- I have not been able to fix the AHCI/HDD issue on Catalina (yet).

I had come across some of these ICH10/patch threads a while a go, but didn't understand enough to apply them properly (or realize if they were applicable). Any advice on how to pursue a fix for AHCI issues in Catalina for my hardware, which specific patches I may need, etc would be very helpful. I tried using 12,2 -no-compat, but it wouldn't boot (not compatible) so I need to fix a few things and retry that. I'll also keep testing HS, and a few other leads/threads of patches and such for Catalina-specific AHCI kexts, etc.

 

[greenfrog5]

So, I am happy to report that I finally got to the bottom of my (major) issue(s)! I needed the two Catalina ICH10 patches linked above and an appleAHCI patch (search Mojave 10.14.4 SATA Hot-Plug not working). These have fixed my freezing and HDD issues, and my system runs well on my SSD.

A huge thanks to EdHawk (and others) for your assistance and patience while I got up to speed learning several years of deferred education about Clover, Catalina, and my hardware.