Reinstalling MacOS via Recovery

[TitanTiger]

I'm having some issues with freezes and not waking from sleep (or at least not waking up beyond a black screen with a cursor) and I've tried resetting SMC and NVRAM, tried booting into Recovery and running First Aid on the disk, tried booting into Safe Mode. Tried uninstalling some things I thought might be the problem. Nothing is fixing it.

So I was going to reinstall MacOS. What I'm wondering is, I know you can do an erase and install or one where you keep your files. I'd like to try the latter. What else does it keep when it does this reinstall? Do I lose all the installed apps? Does it keep all the users? What exactly does this reinstall do?

 

[Fishrrman]

It sure helps when you tell us
- Which Mac you have
- What year it was made
- What OS is running on it.

 

[TitanTiger]

Sorry.

I have a 2017 iMac 27" with the 3.4 GHz Quad Core i5 and 8GB of RAM, running 10.15.5.

 

[Fishrrman]

Be aware that many other folks have reported crashes when waking from sleep after recent OS updates.

So... re-installing the OS might help, or then again, it might not do anything to resolve the problem.

If you boot to internet recovery and re-install, it won't harm any of your personal data or 3rd-party apps. It will just re-install the Apple OS (and apps).

If it was me, I'd do a backup first.
I prefer CarbonCopyCloner.

 

[TitanTiger]

Be aware that many other folks have reported crashes when waking from sleep after recent OS updates.

So... re-installing the OS might help, or then again, it might not do anything to resolve the problem.

If you boot to internet recovery and re-install, it won't harm any of your personal data or 3rd-party apps. It will just re-install the Apple OS (and apps).

If it was me, I'd do a backup first.
I prefer CarbonCopyCloner.

I'm a CCC fan myself and have a back up from last night. Now, I wasn't going to do internet recovery, just reinstall from the Recovery partition (Command-R at boot). Will that do the same thing with regard to preserving data and 3rd party apps?

 

[komatsu]

OP, don't forget that there are two types of Recovery - Original and Latest

Original will revert your system back to original OS.

Latest will install latest!

Just saying because a lot of users mix the two up...!

Reinstall macOS

You can reinstall macOS on your Mac while keeping your files and user settings intact.

support.apple.com

 

[Taz Mangus]

NVM

 

[Ben J.]

And do NOT enable sleep mode!
Just let screens to go to sleep.
Solved it for me.

 

[TitanTiger]

Ok, I reinstalled last night and everything remained intact. So far so good on the lockups/freezing on wake. We'll see if it continues.

 

[Ben J.]

Could you please check if "Prevent computer from going to sleep when screens go to sleep" is selected or not? In system prefs. Having this option checked is what solved it for me.
(Not shure of the exact wording in english.)

 

[TitanTiger]

Could you please check if "Prevent computer from going to sleep when screens go to sleep" is selected or not? In system prefs. Having this option checked is what solved it for me.
(Not shure of the exact wording in english.)

I don't have that checked right now. Right now I'm going to leave it as is to see if this reinstall solves it. Just want to keep all the settings the same as they were before when I was having the problem and take it in steps. But if it reoccurs I'll see if checking that fixes it. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[Ben J.]

Thanks.
Hmm... Maybe my I'm wrong about this.

 

[TitanTiger]

Thanks.
Hmm... Maybe my I'm wrong about this.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm testing this out, if this doesn't work I'll try what you mentioned. Just going to take things a step at a time until I've got everything back the way it was, all external drives attached and so on.

 

[TitanTiger]

So, I went three full days with zero problems. So I decided to reattach one of my external drives. And this afternoon, I had the freezing on wake from sleep issue again. Fortunately I caught it before it totally locked up by logging in via SSH from my MBP and doing a proper reboot via Terminal. So I think I might have a problem with the drive. I have purchased a new external drive that I'll get this weekend. It was a good time to do it anyway since that old drive is USB 2 and the new one will be USB 3.

 

[Ben J.]

Both my external drives are USB3, so I don't think it's that.
Faulty drive might of course cause problems, but I'm not convinced you're nessecarily nailing it down.

 

[TitanTiger]

Both my external drives are USB3, so I don't think it's that.
Faulty drive might of course cause problems, but I'm not convinced you're nessecarily nailing it down.

Both of my external drives are USB 2. But it might just be that the drive is having problems.