Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of macOS Catalina to Developers

[ackerthehacker]

Updating Catalina betas for me is a total mess, hard to update when one hasn't got a lot of free space, system reports available free space all over the place, for instance, I moved the installer to an external disk, deleted the original to gain....wait for it... just 1 GB, running the installer gave me the low on space warning, report free disk is always different from what Finder says, in shirt, a mess (Again, if you are low on disk space.
System also gets slower even when one has 10-15 GB left, never had these before.

The dev beta 4 is worse than the previous betas in terms of stability. Panic 6 crashes for a umcommanded reboot.

 

[tethead]

hour 18 - still stuck on Catalina island screen...

 

[PastaPrimav]

This didn't work out well for Vista, I can't imagine the constant dialogue boxes would work for MacOS. Whoever thought this up didn't think through the perfect case studies of what not to do.

NecRosex, have you tried downloading the Mac OS Mojave installer, creating a 20gb partition on an external and using DiskMakerX to create a bootable reinstall partition? Then you just hold Option key at startup and select Mojave installer.

Apple has some serious internal struggles going on right now, this much is clear. New people and ideas are winning right now that are terrible for everyone (except perhaps Apple Legal).
[doublepost=1563376233][/doublepost]Absolutely insane how poorly Apple is doing with this beta.

 

[justperry]

I tried to do it right after reboot, tried Terminal commands with superuser privileges... Nothing helps.

The file I deletes (sleep image is on the VM disk, that might be the difference, shame it didn't work.

 

[EugW]

One important note if you've been using Sidecar - if you upgrade to this new beta, Sidecar won't work until the next iPadOS beta is available.

No loss for me, as Sidecar has never worked anyway for me.

MacBook Core m3 2017, and iPad Pro 10.5".

----

BTW, why are some of you guys and gals not installing the beta on external drives? On Macs it's so easy to do.

 

[justperry]

I think it’s a bit ridiculous that Apple don’t provide some kind of support for those undertaking the public beta. Nope, just here you go, download it, ****ed if we care if it works or not.

Erm...what, why...it's a beta, expect problems.

 

[mixel]

iCloud seems to be fixed for me! In that it’s not in an infinite upload loop and it’s actually copied over files between machines that have been in the queue for ages.

 

[lodolfo]

Nope, I had issues and still have with Time Machine, buggy like hell, also, if you're fairly low on space it's hard to install the betas, I had major headaches going from the first beta to the second, then third and can't Update to beta 4, says I need 10.54 GB, system reports I have 16.93 GB, still refuses to update, like the other times before this one.

This is because when you delete files, the space they occupy is marked as purgeable, but doesn't really delete the files. I guess this helps avoid unnecessary disk writes and improve longevity, and the space will only be rewritten when something else is actually written to that area on the disk. Now, for some stupid reason, the Apple installers don't see this space as free and that's why you get the error. The solution is to make a huge file with dd and then delete it:

You can use 'dd' to create the file in your directory.

dd if=/dev/random of=~/hugefile bs=15m

If it erros out due to lack of disk space, you can run it again using another file name (hugefile1, hugefile2, etc) to make sure it's purging the disk. Or you can Ctrl-C once the file reaches 10 GB and then duplicate it as much as you can. Either of these will force the disk to purge the space, and when you delete the files this time it will actually free the space and Apple installers should have no disk space problems.

Here's the Stack Exchange post where I learned about this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/304017

 

[tethead]

hour 18 - still stuck on Catalina island screen...

hour 21... marooned on this island. send help, and some scotch.

 

[DocMultimedia]

Really? Like what. The only apps that I lost coming from Mojave to Catalina was Wipr and uTorrent, but both got replaced easily by alternatives

I do a lot of rapid application development for prototypes. No other tool has ever been as good as Macromedia Director (Adobe bought it and killed it years ago) for that, and still isn't one. Will most likely try the Windows version of Director running under Wine once Catalina comes out.

 

[Rique]

Updating Catalina betas for me is a total mess, hard to update when one hasn't got a lot of free space, system reports available free space all over the place, for instance, I moved the installer to an external disk, deleted the original to gain....wait for it... just 1 GB, running the installer gave me the low on space warning, report free disk is always different from what Finder says, in shirt, a mess (Again, if you are low on disk space.
System also gets slower even when one has 10-15 GB left, never had these before.

Have you tried using something like Daisy Disk? It's been a huge help for me when it comes to finding more options to free up space.

 

[Ledurpabbi]

Finally done... jesus christ. Let it run from noon for 7 hours. Didn't actually "finish" until I pressed random keys on the keyboard.

 

[spezaled]

Well, that sucks. None of the issues I reported over the previous betas have been resolved. Looks like it's going to be a rough ride.

 

[tethead]

Finally done... jesus christ. Let it run from noon for 7 hours. Didn't actually "finish" until I pressed random keys on the keyboard.

24 hours now. "16 minutes remaining..."

 

[justperry]

Have you tried using something like Daisy Disk? It's been a huge help for me when it comes to finding more options to free up space.

Thanks for the tip, it's got little to do with personal Apps, documents and related files, my guess it's related to purgeable space and or the new system.

This is because when you delete files, the space they occupy is marked as purgeable, but doesn't really delete the files. I guess this helps avoid unnecessary disk writes and improve longevity, and the space will only be rewritten when something else is actually written to that area on the disk. Now, for some stupid reason, the Apple installers don't see this space as free and that's why you get the error. The solution is to make a huge file with dd and then delete it:

You can use 'dd' to create the file in your directory.

dd if=/dev/random of=~/hugefile bs=15m

If it erros out due to lack of disk space, you can run it again using another file name (hugefile1, hugefile2, etc) to make sure it's purging the disk. Or you can Ctrl-C once the file reaches 10 GB and then duplicate it as much as you can. Either of these will force the disk to purge the space, and when you delete the files this time it will actually free the space and Apple installers should have no disk space problems.

Here's the Stack Exchange post where I learned about this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/304017

Your help is much appreciated, didn't seem to help much, I have a bigger problem now, deleted some files, not really important files but my system takes forever to startup, it's in verbose mode, see below, took already 2 hours, don't know what it actually is, a google search didn't bring up related results.

Edit: Something just changed, it now says "process" xxxxx crashed: lsd. Too many corpses being created.
Lots of crashed processes.
Time for a restart I guess, will wait a bit more.

 

[SDJim]

Yeah I’ve been bricked all day. None of the other betas causes any problems.
Mid-2015 15” MbP 2.2GHz 16gb RAM

Finally went through, took literally all day. I noticed it was on the login screen when I came home at 7pm after starting the update that morning. Geez.

 

[justperry]

Finally went through, took literally all day. I noticed it was on the login screen when I came home at 7pm after starting the update that morning. Geez.

Shame it's not in verbose mode, wish that was possible, so you guys could see what goes/went on.

 

[justperry]

This is my problem...
In target disk mode it shows my SSD partition with the System files is 22,45 GB (Target disk mode), yet in macOS itself it reports about 10 GB, so 12 GB lost, that's the sole reason I can't update.
Purging does not bring back the lost space.

 

[LestâtMayfair]

Has anyone gotten there iCloud desktop files to re-populate on well, the "desktop"?

 

[PikachuuuuuZappppp]

You guys are still considered lucky...
I stuck in the time machine backup since beta 3. It is still backing up (and yes, still backing up, not hang/freeze/crash)...

And I can not cancel it, because this is the only good copy after burglary...

 

[Testing Something]

OK,

So

Developer Preview Beta 3 is 19501i
Developer Preview Beta 4 is 19A512f

I would like to create Developer Preview Beta 4 is 19A512f full usb installer.

1) I deleted all /Applications/Install MacOS*.app

2) I re-downloaded the DP beta profile installation app

3) I downloaded the installer of macOS Catalina Developer Preview throw Software Update

4) I created full USB installer

5) I installed from scratch and the end results is...19501i which is DP3 and it is asking me to update to DP4 from Software Update

My question is - why? Why I can't download the DP4 and create a bottle USB from that installer, why it is forcing me DP3. I don't want to have DP3 + update to DP4 later, I want to install DP4 from scratch.

Any ideas?

 

[justperry]

You guys are still considered lucky...
I stuck in the time machine backup since beta 3. It is still backing up (and yes, still backing up, not hang/freeze/crash)...

And I can not cancel it, because this is the only good copy after burglary...

Timemachine is buggy like hell, takes way too long to finish just a daily backup of just a few hundred GB.

OK,

So

Developer Preview Beta 3 is 19501i
Developer Preview Beta 4 is 19A512f

I would like to create Developer Preview Beta 4 is 19A512f full usb installer.

1) I deleted all /Applications/Install MacOS*.app

2) I re-downloaded the DP beta profile installation app

3) I downloaded the installer of macOS Catalina Developer Preview throw Software Update

4) I created full USB installer

5) I installed from scratch and the end results is...19501i which is DP3 and it is asking me to update to DP4 from Software Update

My question is - why? Why I can't download the DP4 and create a bottle USB from that installer, why it is forcing me DP3. I don't want to have DP3 + update to DP4 later, I want to install DP4 from scratch.

Any ideas?

Just update to 4, it’s the same as a dev 4 beta.

 

[PikachuuuuuZappppp]

Timemachine is buggy like hell, takes way too long to finish just a daily backup of just a few hundred GB.

Completing percentage is now officially 215% What the hell... I wish I can just back it up to somewhere else, but I have no choices at the moment.

I think the Time machine is extremely buggy since beta 2.

My worst experiences on mac (release and beta) since Jaguar.

 

[tethead]

woke up this morning... and I had a login screen! so, only about 40 hours.

the last time an update took this much time, it was using 20 floppies moving up to 7.5.3 rev 2!

I've submitted a Feedback report with the appropriate log files, so hopefully this can be fixed before the next release.

 

[mixel]

woke up this morning... and I had a login screen! so, only about 40 hours.

the last time an update took this much time, it was using 20 floppies moving up to 7.5.3 rev 2!

I've submitted a Feedback report with the appropriate log files, so hopefully this can be fixed before the next release.

Happy for you that it finally actually worked!

Based on how long it took my MBP i didn't even dare install it directly on my iMac. Catalina has introduced a bug where if it tries to "sleep" my broken fusion drive then my iMac immediately Kernel Panics.. So, every 30 mins during the installation.. Which isn't compatible with an instillation that takes all night.. (i installed it by plugging my MBP into the external SSD I run the iMac from, and installing it from the MBP.. Which is a STUPID work around but it worked!)