Hi everyone,
I was hoping for a bit of advice. I have a MacBook Air 2018 that I bought new in March this year. It had been running a bit slow on and off and taking a while to start up but no real issues apart from a slightly sticky keyboard.
Then last week my password stopped working. I tried to reset using my Apple ID and it took me through the verification process and then when trying to retrieve the recovery key it said my Apple ID could not unlock this volume.
In recovery mode, I could not even get into Terminal as it asked for an administrator password (and would not take my password).
In Disk utility, Macintosh HD was greyed out.
(And yes, stupidly, I had not backed anything up so it had my work stuff, business admin and tax files, personal admin and a children’s book I’d written and half illustrated for my son for Christmas.)
In a panic I took it in to my nearest Apple store and after waiting for a few hours was told ‘there are no appointment until next Thursday’, a full week later! So I went home and spent hours on the online support where I was escalated to a senior adviser.
They were all great (I spent the next few days pretty much on the online support with them trying to sort it out). Spent £90 on thunderbolt adapters and cables to try to copy the disk across to an external hard drive with the help of a friends Mac etc. Ultimately, none of the advisers could help me get in and frustratingly, even though I had a written copy of my filevault recovery key, there was no way to get to the place where you would type it in. One of them felt that the permissions had been messed with and another said that someone/something had been messing around with the library files.
I managed to transfer something across on to an external drive. But I would have thought it would be just as encrypted as it was before.
But anyway I erased the disk (after carrying it around with me for a few days hoping it might just work again, gutted) and reinstalled the OS (Mojave) and that worked fine.
But a day later it’s still running slow, takes ages to boot up and there seems to be a huge amount going on in activity monitor (why is it that Apple makes even the most benign of processes sound sinister and suspicions.)
So I was really hoping for some advice on how I can check for any other issues, what I should be looking out for and how I can check for malware (one of the advisers suggested he had a similar issue and it was down to malware but I had Malware Bytes installed and besides, I don’t just click on random links).
Would really appreciate any thoughts or help and sorry for the long post!
Paul
PS
Also, there’s very little on it to be causing a slowdown. Microsoft Office. Roon (no real music library though, just stream from Qobuz and Tidal using Roon). No photos now and hardly any files.
I was hoping for a bit of advice. I have a MacBook Air 2018 that I bought new in March this year. It had been running a bit slow on and off and taking a while to start up but no real issues apart from a slightly sticky keyboard.
Then last week my password stopped working. I tried to reset using my Apple ID and it took me through the verification process and then when trying to retrieve the recovery key it said my Apple ID could not unlock this volume.
In recovery mode, I could not even get into Terminal as it asked for an administrator password (and would not take my password).
In Disk utility, Macintosh HD was greyed out.
(And yes, stupidly, I had not backed anything up so it had my work stuff, business admin and tax files, personal admin and a children’s book I’d written and half illustrated for my son for Christmas.)
In a panic I took it in to my nearest Apple store and after waiting for a few hours was told ‘there are no appointment until next Thursday’, a full week later! So I went home and spent hours on the online support where I was escalated to a senior adviser.
They were all great (I spent the next few days pretty much on the online support with them trying to sort it out). Spent £90 on thunderbolt adapters and cables to try to copy the disk across to an external hard drive with the help of a friends Mac etc. Ultimately, none of the advisers could help me get in and frustratingly, even though I had a written copy of my filevault recovery key, there was no way to get to the place where you would type it in. One of them felt that the permissions had been messed with and another said that someone/something had been messing around with the library files.
I managed to transfer something across on to an external drive. But I would have thought it would be just as encrypted as it was before.
But anyway I erased the disk (after carrying it around with me for a few days hoping it might just work again, gutted) and reinstalled the OS (Mojave) and that worked fine.
But a day later it’s still running slow, takes ages to boot up and there seems to be a huge amount going on in activity monitor (why is it that Apple makes even the most benign of processes sound sinister and suspicions.)
So I was really hoping for some advice on how I can check for any other issues, what I should be looking out for and how I can check for malware (one of the advisers suggested he had a similar issue and it was down to malware but I had Malware Bytes installed and besides, I don’t just click on random links).
Would really appreciate any thoughts or help and sorry for the long post!
Paul
PS
Also, there’s very little on it to be causing a slowdown. Microsoft Office. Roon (no real music library though, just stream from Qobuz and Tidal using Roon). No photos now and hardly any files.