The following occurred on a late 2021 MacBook Pro 16 inch M1 Max, Ventura installed is 13.3.1
Computer had one hour battery left when I closed the lid and it went to sleep. Several hours of hibernation later, strangely, the battery was drained. I charged, computer booted, got to the login screen, then 5 seconds after login computer hangs. FileVault whole disk encryption is activated.
I have already tried the following steps:
i see 2 ways forward: fixing the boot issue or gaining GUI access (via external boot into macOS) to retrieve any files not in iCloud and wipe the drive & fresh install.
My Questions:
Computer had one hour battery left when I closed the lid and it went to sleep. Several hours of hibernation later, strangely, the battery was drained. I charged, computer booted, got to the login screen, then 5 seconds after login computer hangs. FileVault whole disk encryption is activated.
I have already tried the following steps:
- Tried booting a dozen times in normal startup and safe mode, freezes in both cases right after the first login screen (which I understand to be for disk encryption unlocking).
- Tried with all 3 user accounts, both admin and non admin accounts. Same result, freeze after entering the password
- Deleted some files via terminal rm -rf in recovery to ensure there is sufficient free disk space. When Problem first occurred 700MB free, now 60GB free
- Ran disk Utility several times on all volumes, containers and disks. Tried the order suggested by Apple of volumes > container > disk and another time the other way around just to be safe. There were some errors which first aid fixed. Re-running first aid now returns error free results.
- Tried reinstalling a copy of macOS via recovery twice
- Tried installing a fresh copy of macOS Ventura to 2 different external ssd drives (after formatting them to GUID APFS), install successfull but when I try to boot from it in boot options (after holding power button for several seconds) I only get 3 seconds of hour glass and then nothing happens. I see both internal and external drive on the boot options screen, select the external drive, click continue, hour glass for 3 seconds then the continue button comes back and nothing else happens. I did check the security utility in recovery to ensure that booting from external drives is permitted but Ventura seems to have dispensed with this option. There is only full security and reduced security (reduced is activated)
- Tried creating a new admin user via terminal command line. User doesn’t show up in GUI.
i see 2 ways forward: fixing the boot issue or gaining GUI access (via external boot into macOS) to retrieve any files not in iCloud and wipe the drive & fresh install.
My Questions:
- Why can I not boot into the external drive? What’s preventing the drive from booting?
- What else can I do to fix the freezing issue?
- What other options do I have for accessing the files on the main drive, which I would like to recover before wiping the drive and reinstalling a completely new copy of Ventura. So far my approach has been to boot into macOS from an external drive and use the GUI to offload any files. It seems that macOS has been ridiculously locked down since Ventura.
- would it make sense / be safe to disable FileVault via terminal in recovery?
- are there any other options forward I haven’t explored / thought about?
