Big Sur won’t reinstall after Apple Repair

[Crazypete]

I had Big Sur working just fine for weeks on my 16 inch MacBook Pro. Then Screen cracked. Sent to Apple for repair, came back with the hard drive wiped and Catalina installed. Now Big Sur will no longer install- it download and runs the installer, then after reboot it appears to start the install, then just boots normal after a brief pause. Tried the public and developer betas, tried after clean install of Catalina.

Couldn’t use time machine to restore from Big Sur backup so had to manually reinstall everything from cloud.

anyone else seeing this? Have now wasted two days. Thx

 

[honestone33]

Given that Big Sur is still in beta, is there a pressing need to you to have it now? It might be best to wait until an actual release version appears. Be aware, though, that typically the first 2 releases of a Mac OS contain quite a number of bugs.

Also, are you making backups to an external device? Catalina is stable, and it would be a good idea if you make a backup of your "clean" Catalina system.

 

[Crazypete]

Hi- thanks for responding. I back up all three of our MacBook pros to a 2 TB passport SSD drive every week. I haven’t lost any data, that’s not the issue. I’m simply trying to figure out why my 16 inch was running the developer Beta fine, went to an authorized repair center for a screen crack, and now I cannot reinstall BIG Sur, despite it working fine previously. Typically I would have just upgraded my device immediately to Big Sur and then restored from a backup but since I have been running the developer beta since it was released I could not restore from my most recent backup.

 

[Taz Mangus]

Have you tried creating bootable USB of the Big Sur beta installer, booting to the USB installer and install from that?

 

[Crazypete]

No, thanks I’ll try that tomorrow.

 

[honestone33]

Did you first Erase and format the internal drive, then do a clean, fresh installation of Big Sur? Or are you just trying to upgrade from Catalina to Big Sur?

 

[hereinmyhead]

I have the exact same issue and I've never had a workaround. It has been 2-3 months since repaired.

 

[honestone33]

I have the exact same issue and I've never had a workaround. It has been 2-3 months since repaired.

Did you first erase and format the internal drive, then did a clean, fresh installation of Big Sur?