High Sierra install failed

[Markoth]

It seems to me you think this install issue a common problem, guess what, it's not.
If that was the the would be 100's of posts here instead of just a few pages with just a few people having
these install problems.
This was the first new install since I started using OS X from the beginning (OS X 10.0b), and only on one
machine, the other went fine.
Might have been a setting, or a strange partition table.

I didn't say this issue is common. There are a number of issues I've heard of recently, and I've experienced numerous issues with getting High Sierra installed as well. A beta operating system running on a beta filesystem is a very common-sense sort of thing to stay away from, at least for a tech. You're not going to know if that shiny new filesystem isn't silently corrupting your data behind the scenes until it corrupts valuable data, something vital to the OS, or an application you rely on. It's a general good idea to stay away from such a thing, until the Guinea pigs get done with testing.

 

[alexjohnson]

1 day later, sill trying to get HS on my Mac Mini, it's now in a state where I can't boot into anything except the High Sierra Install, I have no wired Apple Keyboard, no startup button presses are registered on boot up time from my Bluetooth Apple Keyboard, so it's more or less in a boot loop, it says it fails, I have to hold the D key to try to solve the disk problem yet nothing works.
I will try again with a bootable MacOs High Sierra USB stick.
Tried to get it to install from a MBP in Target Disk Mode, got a message it's not allowed, hell, I did that many times before.
Can't even start in Target disk mode anymore, otherwise I would just copy my disk to the internal SSD on my Mac Mini.
Eventually I will get there but this is not the way I remembered it to work.
First time ever it went wrong, and I have been on MacOs/OS X since the very start.

After successfully installing on a stock 2015 MacBook, exactly the same thing happened to me on a 2013 Mac mini with a home-made Fusion drive, but I was able to use internet Recovery (Shift-Opt-Cmd-R). When I selected "Reinstall Mac OS X" it presented the High Sierra installer. I thought this was bad news but did this anyway, without selecting APFS this time. The first attempt failed right at the end of the installation, but I did the same thing again and this one worked. I was signed out of iCloud so lost all Keychain information temporarily as well as anything related like Messages accounts, and all two-factor internet accounts also needed passwords and account-specific passwords re-entered: annoying, but much less than a full reinstall from Time Machine. It is now stable and working perfectly.

Before I try, has anyone tried to convert to APFS from Disk Utility?

 

[longjohn97]

Same thing happened to me. 2TB fusion drive, left the option checked to covert to APFS. I was able to boot into recovery and restart the installation process with it left unchecked.

I installed on my MacBook Retina without any issues - so proceeded to my iMac - all seemed to install OK. It is a 2105 iMac 27 with 2TB Fusion drive - now 'About This Mac' reports a 2.12TB SSD not a Fusion Drive. I am having problems on wake - screen shows the file folder with ? mark as if it can't find a hard drive/operating system. Power button restarts OK

 

[justperry]

I installed on my MacBook Retina without any issues - so proceeded to my iMac - all seemed to install OK. It is a 2105 iMac 27 with 2TB Fusion drive - now 'About This Mac' reports a 2.12TB SSD not a Fusion Drive. I am having problems on wake - screen shows the file folder with ? mark as if it can't find a hard drive/operating system. Power button restarts OK

Bold: does it have a Quantum CPU.

 

[longjohn97]

Quantum CPU?? It has an Intel I5 3.3Ghz 'Skylake' CPU & AMD Radeon R9 M395 GPU

 

[ryxn]

I installed on my MacBook Retina without any issues - so proceeded to my iMac - all seemed to install OK. It is a 2105 iMac 27 with 2TB Fusion drive - now 'About This Mac' reports a 2.12TB SSD not a Fusion Drive. I am having problems on wake - screen shows the file folder with ? mark as if it can't find a hard drive/operating system. Power button restarts OK

Interesting - thanks for the information. I think I'll hold back on APFS for now, I'm running Beta 3 and I haven't encountered many bugs yet on my end.

 

[Wheelie4]

I'm on a 2012 iMac, macOS Sierra 10.12.5. When first trying to install the first public beta of macOS High Sierra I got the messages that my recovery partition was damaged could not proceed. So I deleted that downloaded of High Sierra and download it again and this time I got this message. Anybody seen anything like this?

 

[alexjohnson]

After successfully installing on a stock 2015 MacBook, exactly the same thing happened to me on a 2013 Mac mini with a home-made Fusion drive, but I was able to use internet Recovery (Shift-Opt-Cmd-R). When I selected "Reinstall Mac OS X" it presented the High Sierra installer. I thought this was bad news but did this anyway, without selecting APFS this time. The first attempt failed right at the end of the installation, but I did the same thing again and this one worked. I was signed out of iCloud so lost all Keychain information temporarily as well as anything related like Messages accounts, and all two-factor internet accounts also needed passwords and account-specific passwords re-entered: annoying, but much less than a full reinstall from Time Machine. It is now stable and working perfectly.

Before I try, has anyone tried to convert to APFS from Disk Utility?

To answer my own question for anyone trying this later - it worked fine: I had to run it on the named partition, not the drive. Startup Disk didn't want to let me select the drive, saying there were no boot blocks, but when I restarted anyway after a pause it worked fine and I now have a bootable AFPS-formatted Mac mini with a homemade Fusion drive. I suspect I will want to reformat it and restore when the GM comes out to be "safe," but I equally suspect this is an over-abundance of caution and it is just fine as-is.

Now on to PB2!

 

[glyn8385]

Help Please!!!!

I have been running OS beta for several years with no problems, but this time my MBP crashed half way through when it rebooted it just came up with terminal text and would not work i have tried to reinstall 3 times with out Apfs ticked but every time it fails with minutes to go. what can i do to revive my MBP.

 

[Ebenezum]

Help Please!!!!

I have been running OS beta for several years with no problems, but this time my MBP crashed half way through when it rebooted it just came up with terminal text and would not work i have tried to reinstall 3 times with out Apfs ticked but every time it fails with minutes to go. what can i do to revive my MBP.

How about giving more information such as the Terminal text, can Disk Utility see the drive, does DU find any problems with the drive etc?

One thing you could try is to restore from backup, you have a backup right?

 

[Fishrrman]

Ebenezum wrote:
"One thing you could try is to restore from backup, you have a backup right?"

Haha, if he had a backup, he wouldn't be crying for help...

 

[xgman]

I think regardless of this beta status, these issues shouldn't be happening to this extent and if it is this buggy should be in alpha stage still.

 

[DShuman27]

Anyone brave enough from this thread try the PB2 High Sierra that just came out? Wondering if it addresses the issues we were all having.

 

[ryxn]

I think regardless of this beta status, these issues shouldn't be happening to this extent and if it is this buggy should be in alpha stage still.

I disagree. We all know the risks of agreeing to use an operating system in beta. The majority of issues I've seen has been tied with APFS. While I think Apple should have given an extra warning to remind users that APFS is in beta and should only be installed by people who know what they're doing and on a machine specifically designed for testing, it's not their fault at all.

High Sierra is fine for me, and I don't have APFS.

Anyone brave enough from this thread try the PB2 High Sierra that just came out? Wondering if it addresses the issues we were all having.

I'm on Dev 3, and it fixed a lot of things for me, specifically with the Notification Center.

Unless you need to use APFS for a specific reason and have a machine you can test it with that doesn't have important data, don't install it.

 

[DShuman27]

Interesting update from my issues installing. So to recap PB1 huge fail, APFS no bueno. Attempted PB2 install today and took an hour and very clunky not smooth. Go into my mac and it was TERRIBLE on performance 1-2mins to do the slightest thing. Pop ups asking for my keychain and it wasnt taking the right password so had to blow that out and redo it, but overall performance was the worst I've seen from any beta. So I found that kernel_task was going bananas per the Activity Monitor and did some googling to find that was an issue in Sierra too. I checked around and all the solutions didnt pertain to me (all were centered around HDMI or second monitors which I didnt have), then I stumbled on a post about potential hardware issues that recommended to reset the SMC. So I did that and viola HUGE improvements, like a whole new macbook type of improvements!!! I am way better off now than I was so that seems to have been my issue. Still not mucking around with APFS yet but High Sierra PB2 is running pretty good on my machine now. No real issues to report, some spotty lag running chrome but beyond that no other concerns. So FWIW that's my story.

 

[Snollygoster]

Anyone brave enough from this thread try the PB2 High Sierra that just came out? Wondering if it addresses the issues we were all having.

I just did on a MBP13 Retina Mid-2014 with 512GB of SSD and an SD card in the slot.

I selected the upgrade to APFS option and I got a failed message during the installation. It then rebooted a couple of times, looked like it's retrying to install and it finished successfully with the SSD converted.

So, it still struggles but manages to go through somehow.

 

[Skindogg79]

View attachment 702679
notice the "version 2". This is the second beta, was about a 1 Gb download and installed in 20 minutes.

I registered just to share my story.
Late 09 iMac
Installed High Sierra and chose to convert to the new file system.
Bricked my machine.
Time capsule fails and reinstalling
Rebuilding using boot disk(s) fails each time.
Gonna try a new SSD drive.

Mike

 

[Fishrrman]

"Rebuilding using boot disk(s) fails each time.
Gonna try a new SSD drive."

I suggest you leave APFS alone for now, even if you do attempt to re-install H.Sierra.

If I was in your position, I'd:
a. boot from a bootable backup drive
b. try and mount the internal HDD
c. if it mounts, re-initialize it.
d. RE-clone my bootable cloned backup BACK TO the internal drive
e. Mission accomplished -- "right back where you started from"...

 

[bbfc]

I registered just to share my story.
Late 09 iMac
Installed High Sierra and chose to convert to the new file system.
Bricked my machine.
Time capsule fails and reinstalling
Rebuilding using boot disk(s) fails each time.
Gonna try a new SSD drive.

Mike

When I tried to convert my HDD it would always fail and render the drive useless. However i recently purchased an SSD and it converted with no problems - I didn’t even know it has gone through the conversion until I checked disk utility.

 

[pruthvibhushan]

Installed on a 2012 Macbook Pro just fine with an 512 GB SSD inside, went ahead and installed on a 2012 mini, borked.
I couldn't boot from the SSD anymore, now installing from an external Sierra system and installing from there, hope it will be APFS, the one on the MBP is APFS now, don't see speed improvements just yet, on the iPhone it sped up.
The Mini has an SSD and a HD inside, lets see what happens, have to restore form backup later on.

I have a 2012 MBP with a 500GB SSD in it. Having un-mount issues. Do you have multiple partitions?

 

[justperry]

I have a 2012 MBP with a 500GB SSD in it. Having un-mount issues. Do you have multiple partitions?

No, I haven't, I just have one, but the disk has more hidden partitions as is always the case on OS X/macOS, like the recovery partition amongst 1 or 2 more

 

[Newton's Dog]

I was updating a iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2009) to High Sierra the system did its typical power down and reboot and then I got a loud BEEP (sinking feeling) and then nothing. It basically bricked my machine. Powering on would give me an empty progress bar. Could not boot to either of my partition. I keep a second partition with an earlier rev OS on it for situations like this, but it messed up both. so, I mounted the iMac using target mode from another machine (MacBook Pro running El Capitan) and Disk Utilities (First Aid) was totally choking, reporting that both partitions boot sectors were bad and to try to back up. After a third try, Disk Utilities finally got one of the partitions 'fixed' and bootable. Once the High Sierra partition booted, all seemed well. Summary, after some heavy sweating and persistence.... IT IS ALIVE. Pretty unbelievable Apple would allow this nonsense!!!!