Nightmare Monterey Installation

[DavidQPR]

Unfortunately I have had a nightmare with Monterey on my 2020 iMac.

Takes ages to boot as the progress bar sticks for about three minutes.
Control panel, bluetooth, wifi menu icons etc take five minutes to appear after it finally boots.
No website will load on Safari and then I get the beachball. Brave however works fine.
Siri is just an empty grey box

I tried reverting to Catalina(os the device came with) but the only option I am given is to instal Catalina to the Bootcamp drive not Mackintosh HD

Luckily I also have a Macbook Air M1 that is on Big Sur I can use.

I normally wait until several betas in but unfortunately I took the plunge straight away. Hopefully the next beta will correct these problems.

 

[casperes1996]

Wait did you overwrite your main OS installation with a developer beta 1? A hindsight thing for me to say, but in the future I recommend installing test software to a separate APFS container volume. I would normally recommend external drive, but with Monterey that didn't work out for me

If you want to revert you can reformat the whole APFS partition probably

 

[DavidQPR]

Yes I did overwrite the main os installation. Ive never had problems before so I took the lazy way. Taught me a lesson

 

[casperes1996]

Yes I did overwrite the main os installation. Ive never had problems before so I took the lazy way. Taught me a lesson

I guess I envy your luck. Usually Dev Beta 1s kill something important for me, haha. Everything's usually about good enough to not kill me to run as a main at beta 3, but beta 1 has a good chance of going so wrong it literally can't turn on at all in my past experience. Monterey did have some installation issues for me but in running it though I've only had 1 annoying bug so far (also 2020 iMac - i7 10700K Radeon Pro 5700XT)

 

[ArPe]

It’s gotten much harder to install on an external. The trick is to clone your current OS to the external and then upgrade that to the beta after you boot into it first.

 

[Mr Todhunter]

It’s gotten much harder to install on an external. The trick is to clone your current OS to the external and then upgrade that to the beta after you boot into it first.

What I did was to install Mojave on the external ssd then boot from there. It was neccessary to install the latest Mojave version and security update. Once that was done I could see and install the Monterey beta. I was surprised it went so smoothly. And it runs grear so far. I even installed iTunes (because the Music app is total crap)