MBP Won't Boot After Software Update
Mid-2009 MBP with Samsung 500GB SSD, 8GB RAM, El Capitan. Upgraded software through app store, including an OS X maintenance update (I think). It required a restart to finish installing. So, I left it alone and let the machine do its thing. Went to bed and forgot about it. A day or two later, my wife tells me it won't boot and the progress bar (grey screen Apple logo) is stuck at 50% or so. I review what happened as realized that it may have run out of battery during installation. She had closed the lid and put it away...
I have tried numerous steps to complete installation and booting, all with no success.
1. Restart: Bar stuck at 50%
2. Reset NVRAM: Same
3. Reset SMC: Bar moves to 100% slowly, fans come on, machine shuts down after about ten minutes.
4. Boot into Safe Mode: Same as 1 or 3.
5. Boot into recovery mode: Recovery comes up, but cannot reinstall OS X because the drive is "locked."
Disk utility doesn't even see the SSD, so that concerns me. My next step is to take out the drive and access through an eSATA to USB cable. My only real concern on the drive is about a decade of photos, which I THINK I have backed up. Most anything else I care about is on a cloud service. I doubt the drive is totally screwed or unrecoverable, but I'm not sure what to do about it not booting. I only have one Mac, so this make take some doing to make bootable again.
Thoughts?
Comments
Mid-2009 MBP with Samsung 500GB SSD, 8GB RAM, El Capitan. Upgraded software through app store, including an OS X maintenance update (I think). It required a restart to finish installing. So, I left it alone and let the machine do its thing. Went to bed and forgot about it. A day or two later, my wife tells me it won't boot and the progress bar (grey screen Apple logo) is stuck at 50% or so. I review what happened as realized that it may have run out of battery during installation. She had closed the lid and put it away...
I have tried numerous steps to complete installation and booting, all with no success.
1. Restart: Bar stuck at 50%
2. Reset NVRAM: Same
3. Reset SMC: Bar moves to 100% slowly, fans come on, machine shuts down after about ten minutes.
4. Boot into Safe Mode: Same as 1 or 3.
5. Boot into recovery mode: Recovery comes up, but cannot reinstall OS X because the drive is "locked."
Disk utility doesn't even see the SSD, so that concerns me. My next step is to take out the drive and access through an eSATA to USB cable. My only real concern on the drive is about a decade of photos, which I THINK I have backed up. Most anything else I care about is on a cloud service. I doubt the drive is totally screwed or unrecoverable, but I'm not sure what to do about it not booting. I only have one Mac, so this make take some doing to make bootable again.
Thoughts?
I would try to boot from an external source - CD or USB drive - then work on repairing the SSD.
It sounds like a permissions issue. Permissions were not re-enabled after it was installed. You can try to fix that in single user mode. This is roughly what I would do, although probably much cleaner. I usually get something wrong or forget the appropriate chmod value. Sometimes I mess things up. Chown is just to change ownership of the file system. Chmod changes the permission bits for each class of users.
So, my issue is fixed. I had to use brute force, but my system is up and running. I pulled the drive and booted from my old HDD, running Yosemite. This is my back-up. I tried many steps to repair the SSD, including reinstalling OS X in recovery mode. Disk Utility couldn't repair it, but I was able to back up newer files to the HDD. I was then able to erase the Macintosh SSD volume. However, I still couldn't get a new install of OS X on it. Recovery mode's disk utility just couldn't complete it, and it said the drive was "locked." In finally asked a friend with Windows PC to format it and check out (he's good with hardware, and I have very limited permissions on my work PC). He formatted it with no issue, and I was able to reformat and reinstall OSX.
There were some hiccups. Transferring my photo library over a USB to eSATA was no fun. I didn't want to migrate any user accounts or old system data, so I set up everything from scratch and imported my music, photos and documents. Initial reinstall took forever because the recovery partition detected Yosemite and reinstalled that first. Afterwards I upgraded El Capitan and ran various updates. After another day of work, resetting preferences, downloading e-mails, etc...I'm back up. I did have one issue where the system exhibited the same symptoms (100% progress bar, shuts down after about 10 minutes). I almost lost my mind when that happened. However, I just restarted and the issue was no more.
At this point I've got to think there is something going on with the SSD itself. Or, it could be completely unrelated. The machine is 6.5 years old, has a new SSD, and 8GB aftermarket RAM. The battery needs to be replaced next. I'm wondering if there may even an El Capitan compatibility issue. Whatever it is, I realized after the update that "caused" the issue that El Capitan didn't look like it was supposed to (in terms of the appearance of the Finder) when I upgraded a few months back. Perhaps it was a failed upgrade and I somehow didn't realize it.
I'm having the same issue. I have yet to solve it. I've tried all of the same things, save installing over my current install. If I find another fix I'll be posting it here. This is the only thread I've been able to find that describes the same situation I've been having, so I hope to help someone who runs into the same problem.
I'm having the same issue. I have yet to solve it. I've tried all of the same things, save installing over my current install. If I find another fix I'll be posting it here. This is the only thread I've been able to find that describes the same situation I've been having, so I hope to help someone who runs into the same problem.
You are very likely going to have to reinstall OSX. My issue was I couldn't even do that. I had to remove the drive and have it formatted on a PC before starting over. Just make sure you have a bootable backup.
I've already backed up my HDD contents. I was lucky enough to have access to a second Mac via my employer, so I had it run the backups in the background while I worked. My only issue now is that I can't find my OSX install discs. XD But yeah, I've come to the same conclusion; no way around needing a clean install for this one.
I've already backed up my HDD contents. I was lucky enough to have access to a second Mac via my employer, so I had it run the backups in the background while I worked. My only issue now is that I can't find my OSX install discs. XD But yeah, I've come to the same conclusion; no way around needing a clean install for this one.
You shouldn't need install discs. What are you running? You can install over WIFI in recovery mode.
You shouldn't need install discs. What are you running? You can install over WIFI in recovery mode.
Internet recovery wasn't working (at first). It would download the recovery, and then the screen would seriously glitch, almost as if the ribbon cable was damaged (the image being fine during the loading of recovery and inspection of the cable and connection proved otherwise) when recovery would start. This happened a few times, then I finally got into downloading OSX. If I allowed the screen to turn off, it would be glitched when I interacted and it lit back up, becoming either white with yellow stripes, or a ribbed solid blue or teal, in any of the dozen or so times I got this far. I kept trying, and eventually I got all the way through, only to have it have the same issues when going through the Region/USername/Etc. prompts. After a dozen or so attempts to start recovery and to run the OS install, and about 6 tries with the prompts, I finally got all the way through. As expected, no screen issues when actually running the OS, because there was nothing actually wrong with the screen. Needless to say, it was quite the ordeal.
I was using slow internet at home, tried enterprise wifi at work (not possible with internet recovery). I got lucky and found a loose ethernet and was able to discreetly get the installer downloaded. I was able to run the install (although it was quite trying and took over a dozen restarts along the way), and then upgrade to El Capitan, but then I started having more issues and the install "broke" again.
Turns out there is a widespread issue with 2011 Macbook Pro GPUs causing this to happen and it doesn't directly have to do with El Capitan, just that the upgrade was the straw that broke the camel's back. The warranty coverage has been extended to 2016 for this issue.
https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/
I was using slow internet at home, tried enterprise wifi at work (not possible with internet recovery). I got lucky and found a loose ethernet and was able to discreetly get the installer downloaded. I was able to run the install (although it was quite trying and took over a dozen restarts along the way), and then upgrade to El Capitan, but then I started having more issues and the install "broke" again.
Turns out there is a widespread issue with 2011 Macbook Pro GPUs causing this to happen and it doesn't directly have to do with El Capitan, just that the upgrade was the straw that broke the camel's back. The warranty coverage has been extended to 2016 for this issue.
https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/
I forgot to mention that I did have some weird graphics anomalies during recovery. It wasn't as severe as yours from what it sounds, but Iw as getting flashing and ribbons of this and that. It all went away once the install was complete. Things are running well now, but I still have long boot-up times during restarts or what not.