....aaaand mine needs to have its MB replaced :(

[tompiouf]

Hi!
Long story short :

Entry level mac mini 2018
Filevault Encrypted
one day : won't shut down => force reboot.
Boots to screen with the folder and question mark
Then only boots to rescue mode and stays stiuck on the map of the world, turning
All known solutions have been tried both by me and Apple Technical Support
I had to bring it to a apple certified store
they ordered a new motherboard.
Conclusion : I believe this is all FIlevault's fault.
Disk is encrypted, and the OS somewhow forgot that. I'm locked out !!!
T2 chip to secure booting ? My ass.

 

[chrfr]

Hi!
Long story short :

Entry level mac mini 2018
Filevault Encrypted
one day : won't shut down => force reboot.
Boots to screen with the folder and question mark
Then only boots to rescue mode and stays stiuck on the map of the world, turning
All known solutions have been tried both by me and Apple Technical Support
I had to bring it to a apple certified store
they ordered a new motherboard.
Conclusion : I believe this is all FIlevault's fault.
Disk is encrypted, and the OS somewhow forgot that. I'm locked out !!!
T2 chip to secure booting ? My ass.

It should still boot to internet recovery if it's an encryption issue as that doesn't use the disk. It's unlikely FileVault had anything to do with this failure.

 

[chabig]

I agree. Encryption is software related and a motherboard failure is hardware...unless you believe Apple is replacing motherboards at great expense to cover up software flaws...?

 

[SpacemanSpiffed]

There is a hardware encryption engine on the T2 chip keyed to that specific motherboard, which is how they get such high IO speeds with encrypted data and it's part of Apple's general overall plan for the Mac.

Of course, we're seeing that it is an Achilles heel of the T2 + mounted NAND flash chips - if the motherboard or T2 chip fails in some other way - your data is SOL with no option to extract and recover elsewhere. This has me thinking that just having a small built-in SSD for the OS+software installs plus an external NVMe drive via Thunderbolt for data/media/ /usr /user folders is the way to go.

 

[harriska2]

There is a hardware encryption engine on the T2 chip keyed to that specific motherboard, which is how they get such high IO speeds with encrypted data and it's part of Apple's general overall plan for the Mac.

Of course, we're seeing that it is an Achilles heel of the T2 + mounted NAND flash chips - if the motherboard or T2 chip fails in some other way - your data is SOL with no option to extract and recover elsewhere. This has me thinking that just having a small built-in SSD for the OS+software installs plus an external NVMe drive via Thunderbolt for data/media/ /usr /user folders is the way to go.

Can you still recover an external harddrive and an external drive with time machine if you don’t encrypt?

 

[SpacemanSpiffed]

Can you still recover an external harddrive and an external drive with time machine if you don’t encrypt?

I wouldn't see why not.

According to Apple here: About encrypted storage on your new Mac

Data on the built-in, solid-state drive (SSD) is encrypted using a hardware-accelerated AES engine built into the T2 chip. This encryption is performed with 256-bit keys tied to a unique identifier within the T2 chip.

But any backups or external drives using filevault, even if you encrypt them with a password, don't have that extra level of encryption from the T2 chip. So they can be read from a different machine (this is key) and all you need is the backup file(s) and (if used) the password.

The issue is that with any previous Mini, up through the 2014 model, you could removed the hard drive and transplant it into another mini and *boom* - you're good to go, or at least you could put it in an external enclosure and get the data off it. It may need password if it has filevault or some other encryption, but it COULD be read on a different machine and recovered. Not so with the 2018 mini. Any data on the internal SSD that you don't have backed up ... if something happens to the system - and it doesn't have to be the SSD drive that fails - something happens where you can't boot/run (power surge fries some other component on the motherboard) - then there's no known way to recover the data. Maybe the NSA could have the T2 chip and the NAND chips and any other keyed chips unsoldered and transplanted (as long as they are ok) to a new motherboard, but a scenario like that is 25 levels above our pay grade.

 

[tompiouf]

[doublepost=1546167568][/doublepost]

It should still boot to internet recovery if it's an encryption issue as that doesn't use the disk. It's unlikely FileVault had anything to do with this failure.

Thanks for the input ! Well, it makes the problem even worse in my opinion. How can ONE force reboot lock me out of my machine ?
Well, reading other replies, seems the SSD might have failed. After three weeks of use. LOL.

 

[mcnallym]

And the key message from this as always is ensure you have a solid backup strategy in place. Wether the T2 chip is there or not, encrypted or not you always need a proper backup solution in place for anything that you need to ensure that you don't lose.

 

[tompiouf]

[doublepost=1546168352][/doublepost]

And the key message from this as always is ensure you have a solid backup strategy in place. Wether the T2 chip is there or not, encrypted or not you always need a proper backup solution in place for anything that you need to ensure that you don't lose.

There are mistakes I don't do anymore now... I couldn't even breathe normally if I didn't have my stuff properly backed-up !

 

[Heat_Fan89]

And this is one of the reasons why I still can't get myself to replace my 2012 Mini and buy a new 2018 Mac Mini. The Mini itself is not your only purchase as it would be foolish not to buy Apple Care and keep re-upping for situations like these but you'll also need to consider buying expanded disk storage if you choose to buy a 128 or 256GB configuration.

And yet my 2012 Mini suffers from non of those problems. It's on it's 5 year of service and without ever having to buy Apple Care.

 

[pl1984]

And this is one of the reasons why I still can't get myself to replace my 2012 Mini and buy a new 2018 Mac Mini. The Mini itself is not your only purchase as it would be foolish not to buy Apple Care and keep re-upping for situations like these but you'll also need to consider buying expanded disk storage if you choose to buy a 128 or 256GB configuration.

And yet my 2012 Mini suffers from non of those problems. It's on it's 5 year of service and without ever having to buy Apple Care.

I see nothing which would prevent a 2018 Mini from easily lasting 5 years. Though I am surprised at the number of posts I've seen where people are having issues with their 2018 Mini's. It seems higher than what I've seen in years past.

 

[philipma1957]

There is a real problem with proper backup and the t2 chipped 2018 Mac mini.

The 2012 and the 2014 are great machines for creating cryptocoin wallets.

The 2018 is a no go.

The soldered ssd t2 chip complexity does not allow for safe easy backups. Like the older mini’s did.

I can make a few clones of a hdd/ssd that have a coin wallet or two. Put them in a safety deposit box and not worry. Since the drives can boot to any 2014 Mac mini. I have 5 working Mac mini’s and a dead 2011 Mac mini in house. 3x 2012 mid models with 16 gb each.

A base 2014 that boots using an external tb2 ssd
And a mid 2014 with 8 gb that boots using an external ssd.

I can not get safe backup using the 2018.

The t2 chip can fail.
I would need two 2018 minis that both have been told they can boot off three external clones.
I would not use the internal ssd to boot. It would just be an emergency drive.
I think I would need two minis at about 1000 each and the drives at four hundred each.

Putting me at 3200 for a safe system. And I am not so sure it would be as safe as what I have now.


Of course I could just get a base 2018 for surfing blogging and Netflix with no real info on it at all and keep the 5 old minis for the crypto wallets etc.

 

[Ploki]

There is a real problem with proper backup and the t2 chipped 2018 Mac mini.

The 2012 and the 2014 are great machines for creating cryptocoin wallets.

The 2018 is a no go.

The soldered ssd t2 chip complexity does not allow for safe easy backups. Like the older mini’s did.

I can make a few clones of a hdd/ssd that have a coin wallet or two. Put them in a safety deposit box and not worry. Since the drives can boot to any 2014 Mac mini. I have 5 working Mac mini’s and a dead 2011 Mac mini in house. 3x 2012 mid models with 16 gb each.

A base 2014 that boots using an external tb2 ssd
And a mid 2014 with 8 gb that boots using an external ssd.

I can not get safe backup using the 2018.

The t2 chip can fail.
I would need two 2018 minis that both have been told they can boot off three external clones.
I would not use the internal ssd to boot. It would just be an emergency drive.
I think I would need two minis at about 1000 each and the drives at four hundred each.

Putting me at 3200 for a safe system. And I am not so sure it would be as safe as what I have now.


Of course I could just get a base 2018 for surfing blogging and Netflix with no real info on it at all and keep the 5 old minis for the crypto wallets etc.

i don't see how drives are related to anything you wrote. just boot off external and everything else remains the same

 

[jasnw]

There is a real problem with proper backup and the t2 chipped 2018 Mac mini.

I'm not following you (or maybe I need another cup of coffee!) - how does the T2 chip cause a problem with proper backup? Are you saying that if I back up an internal drive of a T2-chipped Mac using something like CCC I can't recover that backup without the original system with the original T2 chip? That doesn't sound right, but I don't know the details of what the T2 chip might be doing.

 

[harvester32]

I see nothing which would prevent a 2018 Mini from easily lasting 5 years. Though I am surprised at the number of posts I've seen where people are having issues with their 2018 Mini's. It seems higher than what I've seen in years past.

Well I returned mine yesterday as it was in the holiday window. I replaced a 2012 Mac mini (i7) with a 2018 BTO i7 and 512GB HD. Overall, for what I do it was overkill but I wanted the "new" one to replace the aging mini. As the first one had problems and Apple asked to "capture" the unit back to their engineers, they sent me a replacement and it too had problems. The first problem was the light on the front that would go off if I went into bootcamp and would not come back on unless I shut it down and restarted. Once I attached the encrypted Time Machine drive, it would sometimes boot in 30 seconds, other times 3:30 seconds. Unhook the drive, and it would be fine. So I formatted it again, this time not encrypted and all the symptoms cleared up. So, I did it again encrypted and they returned. Apple asked to recapture that unit and I threw up my hands and said nope. Going to the store if you want it! Sadly, post Steve Jobs has meant that apple engineers are not accountable. While his management style lacked any kind of decency at times, he did get results and people conformed to Apple putting out a quality product. Lately, it's overpriced and under engineered and I don't want to be their beta testers. So at this point, my trusty 2012 is back on my desk (removed from dedicated Plex duty) and I bought an Nvidia Shield which is purring away giving me the offloaded Plex server and I get my computer back. PS, my Credit Card loves my recent payment (AKA credit!)

Hopefully it works out for everyone else and this is a learning lesson to apple. Stop rushing things to meet stockholder demand and meet your customer demands (not 5 years later either!) It will work out in the end that customer satisfaction will make your stockholders happy in the long run!

 

[philipma1957]

I'm not following you (or maybe I need another cup of coffee!) - how does the T2 chip cause a problem with proper backup? Are you saying that if I back up an internal drive of a T2-chipped Mac using something like CCC I can't recover that backup without the original system with the original T2 chip? That doesn't sound right, but I don't know the details of what the T2 chip might be doing.

Okay maybe I am wrong. Since I am reading lots of t2 info so let me put it this way.

I have 5 working 2012 or 2014 Mac mini’s and every one of them will and can boot my cryptocoin wallet HD’s/ ssds. So I don’t have to worry about losing stored coins. If a mini and it’s drive fully crashes and burns. Any of the other “old” minis will use one of the cloned hdd/ssd.

Maybe I don’t understand the t2 chip. But if I do and I have 3 good cloned HD’s/ssds and everyone was approved with the t2 chip all would work .

So if the new 2018 dies can I buy a new 2018 and let the clones boot? Or are those clones locked to the dead t2 chip in the dead 2018 mini?

As I read this it looks like I need two 2018 minis both t2 chips already set to boot with the clones to be backed up. I don’t mind have 2x 2018s and three or four cloned backups but it will cost me as to be safe I need two

2018s preset to all the clones.

 

[MRrainer]

T2 only concerns the internal drives, which you can't remove anyway, because they're soldered to the motherboard.
At least, that's how I understood it.

I would certainly NOT use a Mac as a crypto-coin storage unit of any significant value.
No ECC, no RAID (no ZFS and consequently no end-to-end integrity-checking on storage possible).
That's a recipe for disaster.

 

[jasnw]

As far as CCC is concerned: "T2-based Macs can't boot from encrypted HFS+ volumes". It sounds like if you can avoid this configuration you've got a usable backup. There also appears to be problems using Samsung T5 external drives for making bootable clones on T2-chipped systems. I found all this is at:

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/help-my-clone-wont-boot#t2_encrypted_hfs

There might be more there, I just stopped at this one Google search result. Personally, I don't think we've yet found all the problems the T2 chips will cause to people who push things outside Apple's desired walled garden configuration.

 

[Juggar]

There is a real problem with proper backup and the t2 chipped 2018 Mac mini.

The 2012 and the 2014 are great machines for creating cryptocoin wallets.

The 2018 is a no go.

The soldered ssd t2 chip complexity does not allow for safe easy backups. Like the older mini’s did.

I can make a few clones of a hdd/ssd that have a coin wallet or two. Put them in a safety deposit box and not worry. Since the drives can boot to any 2014 Mac mini. I have 5 working Mac mini’s and a dead 2011 Mac mini in house. 3x 2012 mid models with 16 gb each.

A base 2014 that boots using an external tb2 ssd
And a mid 2014 with 8 gb that boots using an external ssd.

I can not get safe backup using the 2018.

The t2 chip can fail.
I would need two 2018 minis that both have been told they can boot off three external clones.
I would not use the internal ssd to boot. It would just be an emergency drive.
I think I would need two minis at about 1000 each and the drives at four hundred each.

Putting me at 3200 for a safe system. And I am not so sure it would be as safe as what I have now.


Of course I could just get a base 2018 for surfing blogging and Netflix with no real info on it at all and keep the 5 old minis for the crypto wallets etc.

Yes, we know you are hardcore into crypto, ive seen you on the other forums.

Stop using macs if they dont fit your use case. Just buy 2014's only then.

 

[giffut]

There are already indications that the T2 is causing data corruption via encryption errors and all the other reports about the T2 failures added indicate severe problems for data integrity and workload stability.

Apple positioned the T2 chip as center administrative hardware for any current or future mac. It is a gatekeeper processor for all I/O and it seems to have very serious performance issues.

The Samsung T5 problems are concerning. Apple seems to not to care about integrating third party storage 100%, as much as they neglect it with as other attached hardware - more and more incuring problems are reported. Apple stopped producing their own hardware and relies upon third party vendors, but it is not supporting them accordingly.

I still can´t understand that they got into full thunderbolt 3 support but don´t offer in house thunderbolt docks, storage asf. They don´t care anymore. They once did, though.

 

[philipma1957]

Yes, we know you are hardcore into crypto, ive seen you on the other forums.

Stop using macs if they dont fit your use case. Just buy 2014's only then.

I got five of them.

I am having trouble trying to talk myself into getting the new 2018 as I don’t think it does what I want it to do.

 

[tompiouf]

UPDATE : I'm fed up.
Tired of waiting for Apple to ship a new motherboard so the shop can repair my machine.
I'm getting refund.

Bye bye Apple. Windows has made such improvements, I wonder why I should buy a desktop PC from you. The rest of the software industry has made huge progresses.

Why buy a Mac OS machine ? For the software integrated within MacOS ?
Honestly, "Mail" has made 0 improvements in the last 5 years. Safari is average at most.
"Photos" ? My photos can only be synced in the cloud if they are stored on the internal hard drive : That's a borderline crook practice in my opinion.
SMS & iMessages from my desktop ? My favourite feature ! Not worth 900€.

Oh !Mac OS legendary stability maybe ? Stability my a** !!!
I kept the same PC, installed from Windows 7 BETA and upgraded it for free, up to Windows 10, for almost 10 years.
And never, ever, did I find myself locked out of my machine like I am right now with my 2018 Mac Mini with that mother******g T2 chip.

You stopped caring Apple.
You just want to integrate the newest technologies AND make a big margin on those new technologies.

I'm hugely disappointed and totally fed up.
Cheers.

 

[giffut]

I share your anger. Switching platforms is all we can do now.

 

[SpacemanSpiffed]

UPDATE : I'm fed up.
Tired of waiting for Apple to ship a new motherboard so the shop can repair my machine.
I'm getting refund.

Bye bye Apple. Windows has made such improvements, I wonder why I should buy a desktop PC from you. The rest of the software industry has made huge progresses.

Ouch and understandable. Looking at various threads here I get the sense that we're going to be in for some teething issues for a while with the T2, and many of us don't have the time or inclination for that.

There's a lot of compact desktop options in the Windows PC space - you should be able to find something you like.

 

[MRrainer]

Au revoir then.

I admit, with the T2 "teething issues", I'm not too thrilled at updating either.
But I don't have to, so I'm not worrying too much about it.

For Windows, I'd suggest going for one of the remaining "big" vendors and buying from their respective "Business"-stores.
You also get Windows 10 Pro.

Unless you want a gaming-rig - but then, why buy a MacMini?
;-)

AFAIK, Windows 10 still does not come with it's own version of TimeMachine. As with many other things, you need to rely on some 3rd-party software that might or might not work through the various quarterly upgrades of the rolling release otherwise known as "Windows 10".
Maybe CentOS or OpenSuSE + rsnapshot to an external drive might also be a good option...