cMacPro update from El Capitan to Sierra issues

[deckard666]

I know I know I am miles behind but was worried for some time that my audio plugins may not work so hey yesterday I thought I'd upgrade to Sierra then if that went smoothly maybe again to High Sierra.

Backed up my boot drive (using Carbon Copy) which is an SSD inside the tower to an external firewire one and began the process - Some time later we are running Sierra but my iTunes won't open, it just bounces and then says "Unexpectedly quit", then my Transmission app keeps quitting too... thought I would boot into safe mode to look at it all but it just wouldn't..so I have returned to El Capitan - Any thoughts before I try again tomorrow ? I could partition off one of my 4 internal drivers and clone the current El Capitan to that and try and upgrade and see if that goes better ? If it did work fine could I then clone that to my SSD ? Ta.

 

[Macschrauber]

Try a clean install of Sierra on a spare drive and transfer your important stuff one by one to check what runs.

 

[deckard666]

You say transfer ... I’m most concerned anout my 50k photos and iTunes files.. can I import them easily enough ?

 

[deckard666]

Well I skipped Sierra and went straight for HS and blimey it worked fine.....right up to the point when I tried to update my Little Snitch and christ I got a billion page error log and a reboot cycle - luckily enough it allowed me to pick my startup disk so now back to El Capitan. Learnt my lesson though, this time round I am going to update to HS with Little Snitch removed and the moment it is running I will copy that to a separate partition on my internal drive so if it crashes again i can just revert back to that HS each time till its fine.

 

[Macschrauber]

You can safe boot (start with shift key) to bypass extra system components.

 

[deckard666]

That didn't work on my Mac and I tried it 4 times - My boot is on an internal SSD does that make any difference ?

 

[Macschrauber]

No, was there a red "safe boot" on the screen ?

Need to hold the shift key quite some time

 

[Ludacrisvp]

You could also boot single user mode and then add “-x” to the kernel flags in the file that controls startup which will trigger safe mode boot every time until you figure it out.

This file should be:
“/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist”

Save the change in the kernel flags section and then reboot again and it will use safe mode.

 

[deckard666]

Well I removed Little Snitch and an old Logictech package this time round before going straight to High Sierra from El Cap and it runs like a dream Just need to decide now whether to get
MSI Radeon 4 GB RX 560 and go for Mojave.