Someone help me fix my Mac!

[patseguin]

I previously installed the first beta of High Sierra and all went well on my MBP 2011. I hadn't used it in a while and woke it up yesterday and instead of being on the desktop, a windows was displayed stating "macOS could not be installed on your computer" "The path /System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg appears to be missing or is damaged". My only option is to click restart and a progress bar appears and goes for a while and then I get the same thing.

I was stupid enough not to make a Sierra USB stick before installing the beta. How can I get my machine bootable again?

 

[Fishrrman]

This is what cloned bootable backups (created using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper) are for…

 

[Weaselboy]

Do you happen to have a Time Machine backup from before you did the upgrade?

 

[perezr10]

You could make a bootable disk on a different Mac. That would at least allow you to roll back the OS and start using your Mac again.

 

[patseguin]

I don't have another Mac. I do have a PC, is it possible to someone make boot media on a PC? Every time I boot, I get the progress bar and then a grey screen with a circle with a line through it. I previously was running the first beta so I'm not sure what is wrong now. My machine is totally unusable now.

 

[Taz Mangus]

I don't have another Mac. I do have a PC, is it possible to someone make boot media on a PC? Every time I boot, I get the progress bar and then a grey screen with a circle with a line through it. I previously was running the first beta so I'm not sure what is wrong now. My machine is totally unusable now.

Can you boot into the recovery partition? If you can try to reinstall OS X from there.

 

[patseguin]

Weird, I unplugged the USB dongle for my MX Master mouse and plugged in a USB drive and the computer booted. I guess the mouse was causing some kind of error?

BTW, how do I access recovery partition? I was trying pressing shift for safe mode before the Apple logo but it didn't work.

 

[DeltaMac]

Boot to your recovery system by restarting, while holding Command + r

 

[Fishrrman]

MacConfucious says:
"Man who takes chance with beta release without a backup plan can get left up the river without paddle!"

I suggest you consider buying an external drive that will become a backup.
I'd recommend CarbonCopyCloner to create it.

BE AWARE that if you do use CCC, you cannot (yet) use it to create an APFS volume.
Set your backup to be HFS+.

I would stay away from APFS for now in any case.

 

[patseguin]

MacConfucious says:
"Man who takes chance with beta release without a backup plan can get left up the river without paddle!"

I suggest you consider buying an external drive that will become a backup.
I'd recommend CarbonCopyCloner to create it.

BE AWARE that if you do use CCC, you cannot (yet) use it to create an APFS volume.
Set your backup to be HFS+.

I would stay away from APFS for now in any case.

I actually have an external firewire WD drive with a Time Machine backup. Not very useful if the machine won't boot though. ;-)

 

[Weaselboy]

I actually have an external firewire WD drive with a Time Machine backup. Not very useful if the machine won't boot though. ;-)

Actually it is, and that is why I asked you in post #3 if you had a TM backup. Attach that TM backup and option key boot to it, then use Disk Util to erase the entire disk then restore from the backup.

 

[patseguin]

Actually it is, and that is why I asked you in post #3 if you had a TM backup. Attach that TM backup and option key boot to it, then use Disk Util to erase the entire disk then restore from the backup.

I didn't even know you could boot from a TM backup. I thought it was just a backup file and not an actual image. I'll test that out before I do anymore upgrades.