High Sierra Install Fail on MBP 2012

[Tx_Geek62]

I know this has been brought up in multiple threads (don't bash me pls), but I've read through them and tried various recommendations, but to no avail. Disclaimer: I'm a Mac fan, just not an under the hood wiz (PCs - I can troubleshoot in my sleep).

The problem:
Attempted upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra. It went through the normal motions, but upon rebooting and after I entered my login credentials I got what I understand is a "panic" screen (see attached). Note: this MBP has a standard (non-SSD) 500GB HD.

Reboot, reboot, reboot - same result. So, I go the Command R route and attempt to Reinstall MacOS (no - no Time Machine backup - there's nothing I need to keep on this Mac). It shows High Sierra as the installed product (like it succeeded upgrading from Sierra). I tell it to install on the HDD ("McIntosh HD") and then unlock it with my password and wait. It fails (see messy installer log file attached). From my limited Mac knowledge, I assume the High Sierra installer is trying to force convert APFS on a hfs disk that Just Says No. Ok - probably not that. I did find info out on the innerwebs about entering the following command through Terminal to bypass the hfs to apfs conversion: /Applications/Install macOS High Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall --volume /Volumes/Macintosh HD --converttoapfs NO. It didn't work - received an error to the effect of no such directory.

I decided to do the Internet Recovery method - assuming it would reinstall the original version of the OS that came installed on the machine when I purchased it (I can't remember which). Nope - it did in fact go into Internet Recovery mode, but High Sierra came up for the reinstall and the end result was the same as mentioned above.

I'm just about at my wits end - this thing is beginning to look like a viable doorstop. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[LarryJoe33]

Nice post. I’m surprised someone here hasn’t tried to help you. This seems like it’s right up the alley of a few members I can think of.

I wish I could offer something up in terms of a resolution to your existing hardware profile.

If you have an external hard drive or a large thumb drive try installing HS on that and see if you can boot from it. If you can maybe try cloning it with CCC and copying it over to the internal drive? Additionally, if it boots to another drive and the clone won’t boot when moved to the internal, it’s probably the internal drive. Consider an SDD, it will feel like a new machine.

 

[chabig]

Your logs have many entries saying that the hard drive isn't formatted as HFS+ (Journaled). What's was installed on the hard drive before you attempted the upgrade? And by the way, that's not a kernel panic screen. It just looks like terminal is overwriting your GUI.

I think that if you reboot from the recovery partition. Erase and reformat your HDD to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), you ought to be able to do a clean install.

 

[Tx_Geek62]

Nice post. I’m surprised someone here hasn’t tried to help you. This seems like it’s right up the alley of a few members I can think of.

I wish I could offer something up in terms of a resolution to your existing hardware profile.

If you have an external hard drive or a large thumb drive try installing HS on that and see if you can boot from it. If you can maybe try cloning it with CCC and copying it over to the internal drive? Additionally, if it boots to another drive and the clone won’t boot when moved to the internal, it’s probably the internal drive. Consider an SDD, it will feel like a new machine.

I do have an external HD that I can install to. Should I format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)? Also (bear with me here), if I decide to go with the option of replacing the HD with a SDD, won’t the recovery drive/partition go *poof* - assuming that it is in fact a partition of the physical HD itself? In other words - how would I be able to install MacOS after installing the (new) SSD, won’t it be a blank canvas?