Can't upgrade to Mojave without crash and restore to High Sierra (Late 2012 iMac w/ Fusion)

[barnyard]

Not sure why it happens, but my 2012 27" iMac with a 5TB fusion drive crashes during upgrade to Mojave, and does not roll-back to High Sierra without a restore from Time Machine. Instead I get repeated restart requests, that eventually end with the grey slash (no drive).

My Fusion drive is a "homemade" fusion drive with the existing 128GB SSD and a new 5TB Toshiba 7200 drive to replace Apple's original 3TB drive, which died a while back. It works great under High Sierra.

I'm guessing it has something to do with the Fusion Drive converting to AFPS, but after an install crash and restore this weekend, I'm sticking with High Sierra for the time being.

Has anyone else had similar problems? How did you fix this?

 

[dizash]

Not sure why it happens, but my 2012 27" iMac with a 5TB fusion drive crashes during upgrade to Mojave, and does not roll-back to High Sierra without a restore from Time Machine. Instead I get repeated restart requests, that eventually end with the grey slash (no drive).

My Fusion drive is a "homemade" fusion drive with the existing 128GB SSD and a new 5TB Toshiba 7200 drive to replace Apple's original 3TB drive, which died a while back. It works great under High Sierra.

I'm guessing it has something to do with the Fusion Drive converting to AFPS, but after an install crash and restore this weekend, I'm sticking with High Sierra for the time being.

Has anyone else had similar problems? How did you fix this?

Same outcome, but different Mac and therefore possibly different cause:
I've been trying to upgrade to Mojave Developer Betas since Dev Beta 3 or 4 I think on a new MacBook Pro 2018 (i7 w/ 6 cores, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). The only way I have successfully gotten Mojave to work is to first create a new volume (not a new partition) which you can do on a APFS drive. I successfully installed Mojave on this new volume and can use it. If I try to install it as an upgrade on top of High Sierra 10.13.6, the machine crashes right as the install is finishing. It will boot, have an extremely slow responsiveness while I put in my password, and then always crash prior to getting the OS running even if I empty all items to start on login (via sys prefs).

I'm fairly confident I could clean install but I'm trying my best to figure out how to avoid the clean install because I have a lot of software accumulated over the years and foolishly haven't cleaned up my extensions further than I know how to (a little terminal and a little searching and looking up), but still no dice on Mojave install over current OS. There are several posts about using 3rd party apps to "clean" your system and the clearly more advanced / expert users encourage not to get sucked in to using these so I haven't in quite some time.

I used an old program just to identify what I think is the problem and may be the problem for you. I used KextWizard to get a list of every extension that is loaded on my system. I have 181 extensions and not only am I not sure what each are, I know removing extensions can not only cause problems but that it doesn't remove everything related even if you've deleted the app (remnants somewhere else within the library).

Sorry for the long response, but there's a good chance you might be expereiencing the same kind of conflict in the system that I am - which I'm convinced is related to at least a few of these extensions. This most recent Dev Beta is the first I haven't tried to install as an upgrade as I just got sick of nervously restoring from a Time Machine Backup - although it goes smoothly, it takes a long time, and I'm always anxious it won't successfully complete. We must be close to the GM, but I've never experienced the inability to upgrade to at least a 3rd or 4th Version of an OSX / MacOS Developer Beta and am wondering if the GM / Public Release will even install. Hopefully I can find some tutorial on dealing with old kext files and other extensions. Good luck.

 

[DeltaMac]

Question for BOTH posters in this thread:
Did you try the upgrade from the downloaded Mojave installer app (while booted to your existing system), or did you try the upgrade by booting from an external drive with the Mojave installer that you have created for that purpose?
That might seem to be a small difference, but might make your upgrade actually work.

 

[barnyard]

Question for BOTH posters in this thread:
Did you try the upgrade from the downloaded Mojave installer app (while booted to your existing system), or did you try the upgrade by booting from an external drive with the Mojave installer that you have created for that purpose?
That might seem to be a small difference, but might make your upgrade actually work.

I installed the public beta utility which allowed me to download the Mojave Installer app through the app store. Then I clicked on it to install it as an upgrade on my current computer. I have not tried it from an external drive or via safe mode, nor have I tried to convert my existing drive to AFPS via disk utility prior to installation.

I'm not against trying again if someone can help me definitively, but my biggest hesitation is the VERY LENGTHY restore time from my Synology Time Machine.

Like the poster above, I am wondering if I will have similar issues even with the GM. If that's so, then I'm High Sierra for life (or at least until I buy a new Mac).

 

[ivnj]

Its a bit complicated. But maybe install it on a external drive on another mac. Then make an image of the extednal and restore it on the imac.