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Anyone else brick their 2018MBP?

B

Brianjonesphoto

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 6, 2018
4
5
Seattle, Wa
I unboxed my 2018 i9 32gb 2TB MBP on Thursday morning. By Thursday afternoon it was a paper weight. I always partition drives into an OS partition and a Data partion. My Macs are work horses typically generating 150-300GB of dimage data a data. It’s important that I have access to the data so I wanted the data partion HFS+ format instead of APFS. I formatted the second partion and cloned the OS partition with Chronosync. After a reboot all I got was a ? Somehow the recovery partition is gone and the T2 is preventing a clean OS install. I cannot even to a internet recovery. It will boot to th recovery software but an is install fails and it gets stuck in a reboot loop.

After a little no chat and talk with Apple support I dropped it off at an Apple
Store first thing Friday morning. Well it’s still a paper weight and they are apparently working the engineering support to find a solution.

This happen to anyone else? If they cannot get it up and running my Friday I might persue a refund or new computer.

Anyone else seen an issue like this?

Thanks
 
During startup, your Mac verifies the integrity of the operating system (OS) on your startup disk to make sure that it's legitimate. If the OS is unknown or can't be verified as legitimate, your Mac connects to Apple to download the updated integrity information it needs to verify the OS. This information is unique to your Mac, and it ensures that your Mac starts up from an OS that is trusted by Apple. I would think when you cloned the OS with 3rd party software it removed the digital signature from the OS and caused corruption where the T2 chip had no idea what to do.

What are your reasons for partitioning the drive when the OS already does a fanatics job with optimising your data where you can change the file location and make it easier to view?

At the end of the day sounds like the T2 chip didnt like the 3rd party cloning software. Would have been wise to Erase and create your needed partitions using internet recovery and then installing the OS onto the partition you wanted. Or restore a time machine backup to one of the created partitions.

Depending what security settings you had turned on for the T2 chip. Apple can fully erase and restore the OS using an external bootable or use the Apple configurator 2 tool to restore the device. However if the T2 chip did become corrupt or bricked it would require service.

Hopefully the Apple Engineers can come up with a workaround. Though frustrating, your issue is helping the wider community. It gives Apple the chance to improve their products.
 
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Funsize93 said:
What are your reasons for partitioning the drive when the OS already does a fanatics job with optimising your data where you can change the file location and make it easier to view?
Click to expand...

For the last 8 year’s Indians always had the os and my data in different partion because I work in a production environment and the data is critical. If I need to nuke the os and to an emergency os reinstall my data is safe minimizing down time. I always travel with an bootable copy of my systems as SOS backup to keep production moving. Down time can cost thousands per hours. Usually have a backup computer with me too.
 
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1. You don’t know what “brick” means
2. Sounds like you really screwed up your new Mac!
 
Really took the plunge there partitioning a T2 equipped & always-encrypted AFPS drive with a cloned OS and HFS+ format. Your quest to preserve data may be out of step with the new design as there is no way to recover data if the validated OS, logic board and T2 cannot talk to the SSD. It either works or it doesn't - the price paid for increased security. The futility is underscored by Apple removing the data retrieval port from the board.

I guess you do all your own stunts, so hopefully fortune will favour the brave and you will get a working MBP back again.
 
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Yes. I had to return it and get another one. With this one I am fairly careful. No disk wipe etc.

But I am running into problems setting up BootCamp. I have done this at least 30 times over the years. This is the first one.

The security stuff is definitely half baked. This machine is a premie.
 
Brianjonesphoto said:
After a reboot all I got was a ? Somehow the recovery partition is gone and the T2 is preventing a clean OS install. I cannot even to a internet recovery.
Click to expand...
There's been others that ran into issues, because of the T2. Btw, it seems that the new Macs only want to run on AFPS and not HFS+.
 
Brianjonesphoto said:
For the last 8 year’s Indians always had the os and my data in different partion because I work in a production environment and the data is critical. If I need to nuke the os and to an emergency os reinstall my data is safe minimizing down time. I always travel with an bootable copy of my systems as SOS backup to keep production moving. Down time can cost thousands per hours. Usually have a backup computer with me too.
Click to expand...

Personally, I don't see much point, but sure, you can have your data on a separate partition. Bonus, with APFS you don't even need to decide on volume size since volumes share the underlaying storage anyway.

I suspect your mistake was to clone the OS drive, which has left your machine with a OS incompatible with the hardware and thus not bootable. Cloning startup disks on Mac has always been a bad idea, but hey, people always know better :D
 
leman said:
I suspect your mistake was to clone the OS drive, which has left your machine with a OS incompatible with the hardware and thus not bootable.
Click to expand...
I can sorta see the OP's reasoning behind making a separate OS partition, though making the data partition HFS+ is what I really don't understand the point of.

Regardless, even if the cloning left the MBP with an incompatible OS, why is the machine preventing him from reinstalling from internet recovery after (presumably) that partition with the old OS has been erased? At that point, the incompatibility should no longer be a factor, because the incompatible OS is gone, right? How is that scenario any different than, for instance, me right now (with a functional OS) deciding to erase the drive and reinstall?

Also, I wonder if perhaps the issue is related to the recovery partition. The OP indicated that it had somehow been removed during his partitioning, and maybe something during that process left the drive in a state where the installer is unable to create a new recovery partition, so it fails? Just throwing out a random thought here, but if someone partitions a drive as two volumes (OS and data), and in the process deletes the recovery partition, if the new OS and data partitions consume 100% of the drive, would that prevent the installer from being able to make a recovery partition (since there's no "unallocated" space to create it from)? And if the installer is unable to make a recovery partition, does it fail?
 
mcaswell said:
At that point, the incompatibility should no longer be a factor, because the incompatible OS is gone, right? [...] Also, I wonder if perhaps the issue is related to the recovery partition.
Click to expand...

This is a glaring hole in Apple's design and I hope they fix it soon. I also think its about the recovery partition, that has been a common factor in all related stories... I think that what Apple is doing here is great, but **** happens and one sometimes does delete all the disk by mistake — it should be possible to get a new recovery partition downloaded from the internet in this case.
 
leman wrote above:
"I suspect your mistake was to clone the OS drive, which has left your machine with a OS incompatible with the hardware and thus not bootable. Cloning startup disks on Mac has always been a bad idea, but hey, people always know better"

This makes no sense at all.

I've been booting and running my Macs here from "cloned" drives for many years now.
No problems at all.

I'm typing right now on my "main machine", a late 2012 Mini which I bought in January 2013. From the first day I took it out of the box, it's been running from an SSD in a USB/SATA dock. Runs great to this day.

I also experiment with beta releases of the OS.
I've created a 100% "cloned copy" of Mojave (latest beta), running UNDER HFS+, on a bare external SSD connected with a USB3/SATA dongle/adapter.

I clone my boot drives back-and-forth and boot from all of them without problems.
I'll go so far as to say that in 31 years of Mac'in', I've had fewer problems than the vast majority of Mac users, by employing "my own methods"... ;)
 
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mcaswell said:
can sorta see the OP's reasoning behind making a separate OS partition, though making the data partition HFS+ is what I really don't understand the point of.
Click to expand...
ITs standard procedure in many IT shops, it makes sense to have the OS on one drive and the data on another, but the difference is for servers, its typically a different physical drive. Yet the logic is sound, you have the OS and data separate, and if you have to reinstall/upgrade your data is safe.

I agree on the move to HFS+, that doesn't make sense, unless he has an app that is not compatible with AFPS
 
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leman said:
This is a glaring hole in Apple's design and I hope they fix it soon. I also think its about the recovery partition, that has been a common factor in all related stories... I think that what Apple is doing here is great, but **** happens and one sometimes does delete all the disk by mistake — it should be possible to get a new recovery partition downloaded from the internet in this case.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure it IS possible and is simply done behind the scenes during installation of the OS. But what I'm wondering is whether or not the installer is able to create the partition in this particular scenario, where the user has completely erased the drive (including the existing recovery partition), and created his own two partitions, one of them being AFPS and the other HFS+.

I believe one of the headline benefits of AFPS is that partitions can be created and changed easily. But HFS+ does not have this flexibility, right? So, let's assume for a moment that the OP's AFPS partition was made just big enough for the OS (plus a little wiggle room), with the vast majority of the drive's capacity being consumed by the HFS+ partition. When the installer gets to the point where it wants to create the recovery partition, it finds that there is no space to do so... the AFPS partition (which it presumably could steal from) can't be made any smaller because there wouldn't be enough room on it for the OS, and I assume the HFS+ partition can't simply be resized. Or perhaps the installer DOES steal from the AFPS partition early in the process to create the recovery volume, but then as a result the main OS installation fails due to lack of space?

I'm just speculating, as I don't know the inner workings of how the OS installer does its thing, but if I were the OP, the first thing I would try is completely erasing the drive, just making it one AFPS partition, and see if the OS successfully installs then.
 
I want to add a few details to the assumptions here. I did not format the entire drive until I was instructed to by Apple suspport. I simply partioned the drive with the os in place and running and formatted the new partition hfs+

Also prior to this I had set the boot security to medium so an older os should be able to boot. In hindsight I wish I would have turned it off all together. Assuming I get a running solution soon I will be disabling as many of the T2 security functions as possible. I simply do not need them or the added complexity they bring.
 
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Brianjonesphoto said:
Also prior to this I had set the boot security to medium so an older os should be able to boot.
Click to expand...
I don't think simply changing that T2 setting would make an older OS work on the new MBP. Even though it's on 10.13.6, just like other Macs, its a newer build, so a cloned OS with 10.13.6 from another machine wouldn't work.
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Brianjonesphoto said:
Assuming I get a running solution soon I will be disabling as many of the T2 security functions as possible. I simply do not need them or the added complexity they bring.
Click to expand...
Same here... I changed mine to the "medium" setting, but I think I'm going to disable it completely.
 
Brianjones wrote:
"Assuming I get a running solution soon I will be disabling as many of the T2 security functions as possible."

and mcaswell added:
"I changed mine to the "medium" setting, but I think I'm going to disable it completely."

I don't have a Mac with a t2 (yet), but when I get one, the first thing I'll do is DISABLE ALL SECURITY-RELATED features, like you guys. Nothing but trouble.

Also important -- you want to enable booting from an external drive.
This is one of the most important abilities of the Mac -- that one can boot it and run it from ANY external volume that has a suitable copy of the Mac OS on it.

I wouldn't want things any other way, and will try to keep things going like this as long as possible.
 
wouldn't want things any other way, and will try to keep things going like this as long as possible.
Click to expand...
I see the logic in why they have the setting, though I may not agree with it. I'm not going to make any changes, but I'll wait until the next update to macOS before revisiting any possible changes.
 
I wanted to post a follow up. After 8 days I finally got my MBP back tonight. I have no idea what took so long, but I’m guessing that they were grasping a straws to figure out the cause.

After talking with the tech here is what I was told was the ultimate solution.

Holding the power button down much longer than expected to get the internet recovery to launch. - I don’t know if I buy that part since I was able to get it into internet recovery without issue, unless there is a different level of access with a longer power button hold.

They reformatted the entire volume as APFS Case Sensitive then formatted it again as plain APFS. - This was the critical step for some reason and I have no idea why it would make a Hill of beans but obviously it effected something.

Thanks for the helpful input.
 
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"At the end of the day sounds like the T2 chip didnt like the 3rd party cloning software."

I question using third party software to do something MacOS can already handle. To me it' just asking for trouble.

"If I need to nuke the os and to an emergency os reinstall my data is safe minimizing down time."

How often does this happen that you even carry a back up computer? You job must be pretty demanding and rough on computers.
 
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