Catalina killed my iMac?

[Sill]

I fought the idea of moving to MacOS Catalina on my main machine, but my backup is a late 2012 iMac that sits in the garage and is used for projects, DIYs etc. I figured I'd give it a try there first. I'm glad I did it that way, though I wish I hadn't bothered at all.

The download and install went without problems. The machine rebooted and went to a desktop, emails came through, everything looked fine. Job well done, Apple.

I leave that machine on 24/7, like my others. A few days after the install I was in the garage and needed to look up a video. The video never played, and the spinning beach ball showed up. I was unable to do a force-quit on the process. I tried to change to the preferences pane, and that froze. I couldn't halt that one either. Soon after, every app I tried slowed down until I had another beach ball. Pretty soon it started looking like a clown show on my screen.

I pulled the plug and rebooted. I got the white screen, gray Apple, and the progress bar. It hung at half progress. I pulled the plug and rebooted. It hung at 3/4 progress. A couple more times and I got the thing to almost complete the bar, but nothing further even after several hours.

Its been so long since I've had anything go wrong with my machines I can't even remember what to do to fix this? Isn't there a boot partition on there somewhere that I can boot to and bring up Disk Utility?

More importantly, what happened? How can I prevent this from occurring with my current machine, which is only 2 years old?

 

[revmacian]

Isn't there a boot partition on there somewhere that I can boot to and bring up Disk Utility?

More importantly, what happened? How can I prevent this from occurring with my current machine, which is only 2 years old?

You could try to boot with:
Command (⌘)-R
or
Shift-Option-⌘-R

and use Disk Utility there.

 

[LuisN]

It seems your disk is corrupted and/or diing. It happens. Nothing to do with Catalina

 

[DeltaMac]

What type of boot drive is on your 2012 iMac?
A 21.5-inch iMac could have the standard 5400 rpm hard drive, maybe a 1TB fusion drive, or you could also get flash storage (all SSD). The 27-inch 2012 iMac had no option for only a spinning hard drive
Anything newer than Yosemite would have a slow time of it on a spinning hard drive, for example, and upgrading to Catalina on that hard drive would leave you with a not-too-happy, dreadfully slow experience.
And, as noted above, the hard drive may simply be dying. Nothing too unusual about that.

Which Mac is your two-year old system? Another iMac? Which boot drive does THAT have installed?

 

[Sill]

What type of boot drive is on your 2012 iMac?
A 21.5-inch iMac could have the standard 5400 rpm hard drive, maybe a 1TB fusion drive, or you could also get flash storage (all SSD). The 27-inch 2012 iMac had no option for only a spinning hard drive
Anything newer than Yosemite would have a slow time of it on a spinning hard drive, for example, and upgrading to Catalina on that hard drive would leave you with a not-too-happy, dreadfully slow experience.
And, as noted above, the hard drive may simply be dying. Nothing too unusual about that.

Which Mac is your two-year old system? Another iMac? Which boot drive does THAT have installed?

My 2017 has the 1TB Fusion drive. My 2012 is the 27 inch model, definitely a 1TB drive in that. I imagine its time to put an SSD in there, and relegate the internal to an external drive box, and hopefully I can grab the few things I need off of it.

 

[DeltaMac]

Yes, if the 2012 is a spinner hard drive (not fusion), it might be worthwhile slicing open to transplant an SSD.
Your symptoms sound like a failing, or at least struggling, hard drive.
You COULD also use an external SSD through the USB 3.0 port, and could use that for your boot drive.

 

[Sill]

Yes, if the 2012 is a spinner hard drive (not fusion), it might be worthwhile slicing open to transplant an SSD.
Your symptoms sound like a failing, or at least struggling, hard drive.
You COULD also use an external SSD through the USB 3.0 port, and could use that for your boot drive.

If I do anything with the drive I'll do an SSD swap. I've been meaning to pull that iMac open for the longest time and pull out the mic and camera anyway.

 

[Sill]

You could try to boot with:
Command (⌘)-R
or
Shift-Option-⌘-R

and use Disk Utility there.

I was able to get the utility partition to boot but it was iffy at first. I must have held down those keys for 2 minutes straight but didn't get the grey boot Apple. When I let go, it popped up about 20 seconds later. I'd been through that many times before and it always was like Apple was holding the boot partition just out of reach: "Oh so sorry! You missed it by a couple of seconds! Better luck next time!" but this time I actually got the utilities.
I hope no one at Apple loses their job for that.

Right now I have it in repair mode, doing fsck and related things. I'm hoping I can get a reprieve with the utility. I really didn't want to spend anything on computers this year.

Just when you think you're out.... they PULL you back in.

 

[Sill]

I ran Disk Utility on the machine, and that was fun. For some reason it kept coming up "volumes only" and I didn't realize it until I'd run the utility a couple of times. A couple of minor repairs and nothing serious. I finally found my mistake and brought it up with volumes AND devices, and ran the repair that way. Again, nothing serious. I've run DU on working drives on working machines and found far more errors than what I saw with this. One strange thing stuck out: my machine (we'll call it 'A') would come up as both "A" and "A:data" in the volumes list. I've never seen that before. It also reported that the main drive was 5 volumes. I could see the utility partition and the main one as a volume each, but what were the other 3?

I rebooted, and the machine hung. I reinstalled Catalina (since I had nothing else available, thanks Apple) and the machine hung. I don't think this is a drive issue, I think its a Catalina issue. I don't think Apple should have approved the late-2012 machines for this OS.
[automerge]1578407800[/automerge]

 

[DeltaMac]

Yes, the "A" and "A - Data" are different containers on the drive. Completely normal for Catalina.
The "A" volume is for the system files, protected/read only. The "A -Data" is where all your files are located.
There's no need to try to remember which you can use for your own purposes, as the file system knows what goes where, and how to work with that volume structure. It's all part of the APFS format, as it continues to evolve
The 3 other containers are other parts of the APFS volume structure, such as Preboot, Recovery, and also one named VM.
All quite normal parts of the APFS format.
A spinning drive, although it is now supported by APFS, is just not a comfortable participant.
You would immediately see a return to performance that your older iMac is still capable of, if you would upgrade to an SSD.

 

[Sill]

If I'm reading you right, then APFS should be kept away from spinners. Why then did they approve Catalina packages for an old 5400rpm drive then?

 

[DeltaMac]

I can't say I agree with your use of the word "approve".
Apple allows it to happen (change partition structure when installing macOS).
Allowing that does not mean that the result will acceptable in every case, just that it does work.
APFS could not be used on a fusion drive, at first. Now it works. Apple updated the process for that use.
But, best results are going to be on an SSD-only boot drive. Just works better, more optimized, whatever.