2021-02-13 21:31:00
Whelp that's just wonderful.
A QA oversight in Apple's Big Sur updater may lead to your system getting stuck in an endless loop. Worse, if your disk is encrypted using File Vault, you're quite completely hosed. Excellent explanation over here by Mr Macintosh.
Yet again this is a reminder to Always Make Backups!!!
So what's this little mixup Apple made in their quality assurance? The Big Sur updater does not check that it has enough storage space available on your Mac to complete the OS installation. Depending on how much space you have it will either start but refuse to complete the install, or it will start and fail to complete the install. In the latter case, you're in trouble.
With two of our Macbooks Air the install went fine, but Marli's MBA was the smaller 128GB SSD model. With 39GB free space things went tits-up. Thank ${Deity} that we hadn't enabled File Vault on this one.
Now I can at least boot into recovery mode. Disk Utility refuses to properly image the internal storage to a USB drive, but at least dd still works. Man, this is not how I expected my Saturday evening to go. ( ; =_=)
View or add comments (curr. 0)
All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.