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Ventura 13.0.0 to 13.0.1 borked Mac mini

Cave Man

Cave Man

macrumors 604
Original poster
Feb 12, 2007
7,189
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Neander Valley, Germany; just outside Duesseldorf
Really terrible event. I installed Ventura a few days after it came out onto my M1 Mac mini (16GB/1TB) and all has been well. However, today I did the 13.0.1 update and when I returned to the computer half an hour later it had booted into recovery mode stating that "some files could not be installed" and with the option to reinstall from my Time Machine backup or to do a clean install. I tried the first option and after finding my Time Machine volume and selecting the most recent back up (from about 10 hours before) I was informed that I needed to have Migration Assistant installed to do the recovery from the Time Machine volume. Since when has Migration Assistant been an optional install? I thought it was part of the base macOS installation.

So, I moved on to the worse option, a fresh install of Ventura. Unfortunately, the install progress bar moves a bit, then the computer reboots back into recovery mode. WTH? I am now on the third attempt to do a fresh install of Ventura and it doesn't seem like it's going to work this time, either. How do I get around this problem?
 
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Hmm, did you try to fully erase the drive (delete all volumes etc) in the disk utility before installation? Also, I suppose the drive is using APFS?
 
I'm doing that now. I made a bootable USB thumb drive with 13.0.1, erased the internal SSD (APFS) and have about 2 hours remaining on the install. If it's successful, and if Migration Assistant is installed, I'll restore from the Time Machine volume. This has really surprised me. I've been using Macs since 1996 and this is the first time I've had such an experience. I even had to plug in an only USB keyboard and mouse because the mini wouldn't connect to my bluetooth keyboard or Magic Mouse 2.
 
Cave Man said:
I'm doing that now. I made a bootable USB thumb drive with 13.0.1, erased the internal SSD (APFS) and have about 2 hours remaining on the install. If it's successful, and if Migration Assistant is installed, I'll restore from the Time Machine volume. This has really surprised me. I've been using Macs since 1996 and this is the first time I've had such an experience. I even had to plug in an only USB keyboard and mouse because the mini wouldn't connect to my bluetooth keyboard or Magic Mouse 2.
Click to expand...
If this doesn’t work and if you have another fairly recent Mac, along with a USB-C cable around, you could do a DFU restore of the Mac using Apple Configurator. This would remove all data on the Mac but will surely bring it back to life, running 13.0.1.

Apple Configurator User Guide for Mac

Apple Configurator makes it easy to deploy iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV devices in your school or business.
support.apple.com support.apple.com
 
Well, the (mis)adventures continue.

An attempted reinstall from a USB stick with Ventura 13.0.1 led to 30+ hours of restoration from my Time Machine volume, which then promptly let to a spontaneous re-boot and an alert with the exact same error message, stating that macOS X needed to be reinstalled from the recovery partition. So, this time, I installed 13.0.1 from the USB stick but did not choose Time Machine recovery. Instead, I first used Migration Assistant to move all my applications over and that was successful. Now, I want to manually copy all my home folder files from my Time Machine volume over to my new home folder. Unfortunately, when I open the Time Machine volume and drill down to my home folder on the Time Machine drive, I don't have permission to access those folders (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc.). So, I try to set my access in the Get Info box for a folder, enter my admin password, but I cannot change any of the permissions. I fire up terminal, cd "/Volumes/Time Machine", invoke ls to get a directory listing and I get:

ls: .: Operation not permitted

So, what's the trick to setting access permissions to a Time Machine volume? It's initialized as an APFS disk (8TB hard drive via USB3).

There is an option to "Enter Time Machine" in the Finder window of the Time Machine drive but I'm nervous to use it because of the chance it might somehow compromise the drive and I won't be able to recover anything from it. That would be a disaster that I need to avoid at all costs.
 
Do you know the UID of your old/new user? In macOS this defaults to 501 on the first user created. Check the UID on the volume and the sparsebundle.

In Finder, if you check "Info" on the volume (e.g. from the desktop), there is a checkbox in the bottom of the information window about "ignoring ownership on this volume". Is it possible to check? Can you then browse the sparsebundle from Finder?

If you need to see and change BSD flags; macOS provides chflags(1) and stat(1) in addition to ls(1).
Use ls -lo (that's a lowercase L) to list existing OS flags (and extended attributes) on directories and files.
To change flags, use chflags followed by a comma-separated list of flags to add to file. Removing a flag is done by setting the flag for the file, but the flag name prepended by no.
Example; chflags nohidden ~/Library will make the Library folder visible in finder. The different flags are listed in the manpage for chflags(1).

Edit; I just realised, and you probably already know this, but you need to check and change flags as root. Since it involves a lot of walking around and listing, I would open a root shell rather than prefixing everything with sudo, but that's personal preference. To open a root shell, type sudo -s.
 
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Cave Man,
There's another option for going back to a previous installed OS called Fallback Recovery which is available for M1 computers. It rolls back your computer to the previous version and is accessed by pressing the Power button twice in rapid succession and holding on the second press. I haven't used it but came across reference to it in MacLife's December issue which has an article, written by Howard Oakley, "200 Ventura Tips," which further states that "Fallback is only available after your Mac has updated macOS, as it's a copy of that last Recovery system."
 
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stradify said:
Cave Man,
There's another option for going back to a previous installed OS called Fallback Recovery which is available for M1 computers. It rolls back your computer to the previous version and is accessed by pressing the Power button twice in rapid succession and holding on the second press. I haven't used it but came across reference to it in MacLife's December issue which has an article, written by Howard Oakley, "200 Ventura Tips," which further states that "Fallback is only available after your Mac has updated macOS, as it's a copy of that last Recovery system."
Click to expand...

Great find! So it's possible to roll back to 12.6 from 13.0 with this method? Not that I need it, but few people complained they could not return to Monterey from Ventura by erasing the drive and installing from internet, there was only Ventura proposed for installation after they already had installed it previously.
 
"So it's possible to roll back to 12.6 from 13.0 with this method?"

From what I read it rolls your computer back to your last installed OS so if you upgraded to 13.0 from 12.6 then it would roll you back to OS 12.6. If you had installed 12.6.1 after 12.6 then it would roll back to 12.6.1

If you haven't been to Howard Oakley's website 'The Eclectic Light Company' it's a great resource: https://eclecticlight.co/

Since he's the author of the article, '200 Ventura Tips' in the December MacLife, you could ask him to give you the details on how it works.
 
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Cave Man said:
Un-fskin' believable. It's happened again. I just tried doing the 13.2 update and now the computer won't boot. Progress bar gets stuck about 3/4 of the way. Does anyone have an idea of what the hell is going on? This is completely ridiculous that a Mac mini has such a problem.
Click to expand...

Do you install on internal drive?
 
Nope. Nothing. Had to build a fresh 13.2 installer USB stick to do the install. Now I'm running Migration Assistant to restore from my Time Machine volume, which will likely take 3 or 4 days to move the ~1.2 TB of data/apps to the SSD on the mini because APFS is so fsking slow.
 
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