Well, I have given up on Sequoia on my iMac. It is a mess and so I’m looking to clean install sequoia. Everything is crazy and the computer messes up all the time - won’t enter spaces in text all of a sudden, weird behavior when I want to see a document using Quick Look form the menu (since pushing the spacebar causes all kinds of problems with the text but if I double press the spacebar the item opens in Preview but then won’t let me enter a text box with any text using a space between words.
So with fear and trepidation I am moving to clean install. I am using Time Machine and will do Carbon Copy Cloner with multiple backups on several different disks to assure I have everything. I have read that I need to download a copy of Sequoia from the App Store and install it on a thumb drive. My question is how do I do that? Won’t the App Store download Sequoia to my apps in my hard drive? Or is there. na installer version that I can download to the thumb drive?
Please help me with any suggestions and recommendations you have on how best to do this. I’m working with vision limitations and a lot of what I will be doing will not be with the advantage of the zooming ability I presently have. Thanks in advance for any guidance you provide!
Are you seeing these problems in fresh user account, Doug? If so, it’s probably hardware failing (possibly even a bad USB device on the bus). If not, it’s something in your account.
An installation of macOS can’t really be corrupted anymore, so what we used to consider a clean install likely won’t help if you bring back everything that’s in your user account afterward. I had luck with what I call a “level 2 clean install” a few versions back. In essence, you wipe the drive, reinstall macOS, and bring back only the contents of my Home folder when restoring. All apps have to be reinstalled manually.
I could even imagine going further to bring back everything via Finder drags only to eliminate the possibility of corrupted preferences in ~/Library, but that would be even more work.
No idea if it applies to your situation, but often this is the result of having “Full Keyboard Access” accidentally turned on in Accessibility settings.
The only thing that changed was I updated the OS from Catalina to Sequoia. It has been bug filled ever since. I did have the problem of the stuck ethernet connection but after guidance from TidBITS folks I was. able to release that but that was after the system update which was already giving me grief. I once owned Techtool which would let me test all the various items of the computer - fans, connections, ram, etc. I may have to spring for a new version of that to see if it is a usb or something.
I read your Level 2 Clean Install and it sounds interesting. I’m not sure how to boot into Mac OS Recovery. I tried the previous way holding down command-R but nothing happened.
I have reset NVRAM and SMC but no change. I’ve been following Take Control of Solving Mac Problems, version 1.1" guides to check other items. Seeing where this will lead.
But that’s a really big jump, making it all the more likely that there is corruption in some core preferences files. Again, you really want to test in a clean user account to eliminate that as a variable.
Reinstalling Sequoia won’t hurt anything, but if the problem is with preferences files or hardware, it won’t make any difference. Since the installation has to pass cryptographic tests to boot, it’s basically not possible for there to be a difference between what you’re running now and what you’d install. I suppose it’s conceivable the installer could do more checking for preference corruption or the like since you last installed it, but that seems tenuous.
That’s still correct, but you have to do it immediately after powering the Mac on. If it doesn’t work, that’s an indication of something being wonky at a low level, and you can use Internet Recovery in that case. Details here:
Try Apple Diagnostics first by holding down D at boot.
When I had problems like this, it was the failure of an old Hybrid drive. My current 2019 iMac is running Ventura with no problems. This does sound a lot like hardware failure.