I had to rebuild my iMac - my tale of woe

[maflynn]

Come hither children and learn my woeful tale

Its actually not too bad, but I spent the majority of the week on getting my iMac back up to speed.

My configuration
Internal Fusion drive was split up. The SSD portion was running windows, the spinning drive two data drives. One for windows (NTFS format) and the other for macOS. macOS was running on an external SSD (Samsung T3)

What went wrong:
I loaded Mojave onto my iMac, and DP1 was stable, I installed DP2, and things started going south. The biggest issue is that I lost my windows partition, or the ability to boot windows even the recovery USB I made (which was bootable on my other computers). I read that it might be the encryption, so I decrypted the drive that mojave was on and that destroyed everything. The decryption was error free but no apps would work, rebooting was worse because now Finder was dead.

I took opportunity to refuse the internal drive and run off that. First issue re-fusing produced odd results, after using CCC to restore my High Sierra drive, I had two "Macintosh HD" showing up, even though diskutil and Disk Utility showed only one.

Re-did the fusing and instead of using CCC, I booted up using the internet recovery. First time, macOS failed to install, tried again and this time the process downgraded to El Cap (not by my choice) and so I installed that cleanly, and then upgraded to HS.

All is well now, I've used my TimeMachine backup to selectively restore my data and I'm manually copying my apps. As of today I have my system back to the way it was.

I understand that running betas carries a level of risk, but this is the first time I got burned. I always keep backups (both CCC and TM) and so I'm happy that I have my data. I was surprised at how long it took for me, though admittedly I had couldn't spend large swaths of time working on this, so that's probably why its now Thursday and I just finished up

Im actually pretty happy with the end result, I'm no longer running on the external drive, there's no need, and my system is a lot more simpler now. Plus I freed up a usb port as I no longer need the Samsung T3 running

Moral of the story - back up your data

 

[kohlson]

Moral of the story - back up your data

Early, often, and completely!

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Ma are you using CCC 5 which is provisionally compatible with the beta release?

Of course it is a paid upgrade from CCC4.


https://bombich.com/download

 

[JustMartin]

I’ve been wondering about going to Mojave on my fusion iMac. Have done the previous public betas. But this time round, I’m nervous about APFS. Backed up and a vanilla config, but would still be a pain to have to restore. This story does not give me any more confidence

 

[maflynn]

are you using CCC 5

Nope, I'm happy with 4. I wasn't going to backup my Mojave setup for a while as I didn't want to overwrite my HS setup on CCC or TM

but would still be a pain to have to restore.

Same here, I was running into major issues with Mojave, like Safari requiring me to log into each website I go to. It was a pain. When I lost the windows partition (it was there just not bootable, so I was decrypting to see if would be bootable after that). I was able to go on, but I was forced to bite the bullet and rebuild my iMac from scratch. As I said, it was a lot of work, but silver lining in this headache was that I reworked the configuration and brought my iMac back to stock.