I am aware that you can not just clone OSX installations between different vintage machines anymore since 10.7. (It's supposed to still work but there is sloppiness and we all know better.)
Anyway long story short, I swapped a drive into a like model machine that had a clean install of 10.13 and the first thing I did was boot into the recovery partition (needed to mess with the Terminal there). The boot hangs half way. Weird... I just tried to boot normally next. Well that half way boot managed to restore some default kexts that I had removed from the main system. Kexts also not normally loaded or used by the recovery partition.
What the heck?!
Is something tied to firmware or something written into NVRAM that links a machine to a specific OSX install with 10.13? Or was this simply another 10.13 bug related crash? The kext restore bit seems beyond coincidence.
I just wiped the drive and reinstalled in the target machine and everything is normal. I haven't repeated the experiment yet (swap clean installed drive to another same model machine and try booting into recovery first thing).
I know the startup drive info is stored in NVRAM. So OK, operator error in a way not clearing NVRAM first. That can put the Recovery system into "repair mode" or something? I was under the impression that you can reinstall OSX (and shift or option will get you different choices of version) but I haven't heard anything about altering/modifying/repairing the current system. Maybe they just call it "installing" in the write-up and it can do an update-like fix? Except when you run the installer and it calls home to get the latest version updates, it's pretty obvious when this step is going on and it is not just quick. The mystery kext restore was seconds quick!
What the heck?
Anyway long story short, I swapped a drive into a like model machine that had a clean install of 10.13 and the first thing I did was boot into the recovery partition (needed to mess with the Terminal there). The boot hangs half way. Weird... I just tried to boot normally next. Well that half way boot managed to restore some default kexts that I had removed from the main system. Kexts also not normally loaded or used by the recovery partition.
What the heck?!
Is something tied to firmware or something written into NVRAM that links a machine to a specific OSX install with 10.13? Or was this simply another 10.13 bug related crash? The kext restore bit seems beyond coincidence.
I just wiped the drive and reinstalled in the target machine and everything is normal. I haven't repeated the experiment yet (swap clean installed drive to another same model machine and try booting into recovery first thing).
I know the startup drive info is stored in NVRAM. So OK, operator error in a way not clearing NVRAM first. That can put the Recovery system into "repair mode" or something? I was under the impression that you can reinstall OSX (and shift or option will get you different choices of version) but I haven't heard anything about altering/modifying/repairing the current system. Maybe they just call it "installing" in the write-up and it can do an update-like fix? Except when you run the installer and it calls home to get the latest version updates, it's pretty obvious when this step is going on and it is not just quick. The mystery kext restore was seconds quick!
What the heck?
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