Good Evening,
Long story short, My girlfriend attempted to update her laptop from I think was Catalina to Sequoia and after hours of wait, cannot go past the login screen. I then took it home to try fix it.
I can access recovery mode fine and ran First Aid on all volumes and containers, everything seems healthy on that side.
I then decided to reinstall sequoia from there, on top of the existing system, maybe something went slightly wrong during the first update. Hours later, installation seems sucessful but exact same issue, can’t past the login screen.
What I experience is I try to login, then a progress bar appears as if the update was still sort of finalising, then gets stuck at 75% and wouldn’t move. I even left it overnight thinking it was just a bit longer. nothing changed.
I googled a lot, seen people talking about safe mode, so I tried that. I made it past that progress bar to what looks like a more normal macos login screen. I enter my password again and now I have that spinny wheel thing that yet again, spins indefinitely but doesn’t seem to go anywhere.
My next solution was to wipe the drive clean and do a fresh install. Problem being she doesn’t have any backups. So I attached a external drive and started looking a solution to backup her files from whatever tool is available in recovery mode. From disk utility it doesn’t seem like I can do a full image of the disk or any of its volumes. I assume it’s because it’s encrypted but i don’t really know.
I then tried to do an “Image from a folder” taking an image of her user profile home. This failed as well after many hours with the error message “wrong arguments”, that doesn’t really help me at all. I then open a terminal and start copying files with a good old cp. For some reason, some of the files (not even system files, just random pictures, etc) hit the error that doesn’t make any sense to me: fcopyfile failed: Resource deadlock avoided. What sort of deadlock will a harmless picture cause I don’t know. It is worth mentioning that it’s always the same files causing this error, even cp -f can’t get through it.
So I’m now in a situation where I either need:
- A reliable way to reinstall a working system without losing user files
- A reliable way to backup files so I can wipe the disk and do a fresh install.
Google didn’t help apart from confirming I wasn’t alone in that case, many people have iCloud / Time Machine backups which makes their life easier than mine.
For reference, the aforementioned laptop is a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro 13″. This is all I know as I can’t access hardware info without a working system (and all the method to do it from recovery mode failed for me)
Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated. I’m really tech savvy and happy to try convoluted/complicated methods as long as I can be assured they will work.