macOS 12 Monterey Upgrade Issues

Seems necessary to upgrade your Computer Science degree before upgrading your macOS these days.

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I upgraded my MBP 2018 to Monterey.
I have been waiting (and rightly so) to upgrade the OS on my 2017 iMac. I recently upgraded the NVME SSD to a 1 TB unit and from what I read here it seems I will run into trouble because of the firmware issue. I donā€™t have to spell out that replacing the original SSD is a pain in the ā€¦ on this machine. I would rather not have to open it up again. Is there a chance that a new installer will provide a workaround for this without having to replace the SSD?

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Several people on the Apple discussion board have reported problems involving external SSD devices and extremely long (10ā€“20 minute) boot times. I have the OS installed on the Trash Canā€™s internal drive, but my home folder is on an external SSD. Booting after the installation of Monterey stalled completely, until I disconnected the SSD. That got me to the login screen. I reconnected the SSD and logged in, but it was 30 minutes before I saw the desktop, and then my home folder appeared to have been trashed.

To make a long story short, the installer had removed all read/write permissions from the root of the SSD, so that at login time, the OS had created a phantom volume at the mount point for my user folder. I hacked my way out of that problem. I can now boot and login with the SSD attached and my home directory is back.

However, although the boot time is normal, the login time (between entering my password and seeing the desktop) is still in the tens of minutes.

If you use an external SSD for the OS or your home folder, better wait until 15.0.2 or later.

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Any idea whether this also is the case for non-Apple internal NVME SSDā€™s?
In my case I replaced the 28 GB NVME SSD from the Fusion Drive with a 1 TB OWC drive.

I tried to upgrade earlier last week to Big Sur from Catalina, but had problems downloading it, and when I finally got one that would run, I got an error that it couldnā€™t proceed. So I just quit to try another day. As it turned out, this was a good thing, because I saw a posting on MacInTouch a day or so later about the Monterey upgrade bricking some folks computers. He referenced a similar problem with Big Sur which led to this page: https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-upgrade-to-big-sur-failed-stuck-progress-bar-fix-prevention/

This reports that the problem is due to having over 20,000 files in a specific system directory as reported in this thread. I tried running the command in #2 on that page to see how many of those files I had, but it never returned a number, even after letting it run overnight. I then tried running the command in #2 to delete the files, but had the same result.

I next followed a link on that page to this one: Spotlight mdworker.shared file flooding system log; removal stops search index from working properly? | Page 4 | MacRumors Forums

I tried the commands in the posting by auxbuss to first see how many files I had (over 250,000ā€¦) then to remove them. I then ran the first command again and got a file or directory not found message, so I was sure they were gone.

The bottom line is that I was finally able to download and install Big Sur, although I had the same problems with the download as before. I finally worked through them by restarting the computer and running it again.

But one of the first things I did after it was up and running was replace the really ugly display wallpaperā€¦

Another slight digression
I got a confirmation from OWC that Monterey and Aura Pro X2 donā€™t get along without the OEM-SSD Swapification-Method to install Monterey, (and actually by backwards extension: Big Sur, and Catalina(?)) to be compatible with
firmware v. 428.40.10.0.0.
Here is my question: Did Apple ever actually post a notification to this effect?
I only ever garnered info on this issue by way of subsequent articles at various boards

I run my own DNS server on Redhat Linux on VMware. This spring I did a total renewal of the DNS server and a lot had happened regarding security. Maybe macOS checks if your local DNS server is up to date on security?

OWC has an article confirming the issue with non-Apple SSDs and the need for firmware updates using the original Apple SSD.

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If you donā€™t have any apps that require Monterey (I canā€™t think of any at this time), then thereā€™s no rush. Take your time and upgrade when you feel it is stable.

At minimum, Iā€™d wait until reading that the current issues (especially the bricked system problem) have been solved and that no other critical bugs have surfaced. I have no idea what the version number will be at that time, but thatā€™s what Iā€™d wait for.

Sure, Apple would like everybody to upgrade immediately, but your primary goal is (I assume) a stable platform for your apps, not a showcase for Appleā€™s latest OS.

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I am just a simple end-user. Non-techy but non-idiot also. butā€¦ Iā€™m terrified to upgrade. I have a Mac Book Pro 2020 running Big Sur 11.6. I have no problems. Should I wait until the next iteration is available?

I have the same question about my iphone and 15.1 (I have 14.8.1)

Thank you, David. Iā€™ll wait.

@ace
Thanks for the info. It seems I could upgrade to Monterey as I performed the upgrade from Catalina to Big Sur before I switched the NVME SSDā€™s.
Or am I wrong?
Anyway! Iā€™ll wait till at least 12.1 to take the leap.

Me too. Gonna wait.

4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Apple Releases macOS 12 Monterey with iOS 15.1, iPadOS 15.1, watchOS 8.1, tvOS 15.1, and HomePod Software 15.1

I have a system running Monterey 12.1 Beta, (just fine) and/but still waiting before allowing the official release kick in

ā€¦ but Iā€™m an admitted worry-wort

:flushed:

Iā€™ve never opened a MBPro past iteration 2015.
Did you have to solder in a new drive in the 2017?

Well, jmhbpc, not as much of a worry wort as I amā€¦ Iā€™m waiting till 12.1 is official b/f doing anything. I come by the worry honestly tho. As Iā€™m sure you do alsoā€¦ (A bit off topic, I know).

I got a new 4TB USB-C backup drive for my M1 Max (1TB storage, 850gb used) machine. I partitioned it into a pair of 2TB partitions, one for TimeMachine. Then I pointed TimeMachine to that partition. TimeMachine ran quite quickly (compared to the previous machine and its FW800 backup drive.) But it didnā€™t complete. The message was ā€œnot enough storageā€ and DiskUtility showed 1.8tb used on the backup device. I ran DiskUtility->Repair on the drive, just in case, and restarted backups. Same message. So then I started excluding stuff from backups. Eventually TimeMachine completed, the storage was reset down from 1.8tb down to the expected 600gb. I re-enabled the rest of my files, and now TimeMachine is behaving as expected. A bit more than 1TB is shown in use on the backup partition.

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Time Machine on Monterey seems to be a bit buggy as well. I discovered this last night when I enabled Time Machine on my new MBP, opting to start from scratch. A few hours later, Time Machine was no longer running, but it said it was still waiting to complete the first backup. Iā€™ve restarted Time Machine multiple times, but Time Machine never finishes the first backup.

I searched the web this morning and found others that have encountered this seemingly common problem with Monterey, so if you rely on Time Machine as your main backup, you have another reason to hold off on upgrading.

Apple is reportedly aware of the issue and working on a fix. (Supposedly, this is yet another bug first reported during beta testing that somehow escaped Appleā€™s attention.)

Does anyone have any knowledge on how much space one needs for an in-place Monterey install ? - hereā€™s a situation - A customer with Mojave has a MBP with a 256g ssd in it. - She had about 12 g left of Freespace with the Monterey Install downloaded already - We dug around her drive and removed about 40 gig and at reboot it appeared to have about 79 g free. Run Monterey installer and everything seems groovy - but at the last bit - it reports an error and presents less than 9 gig available. Also, the Main Drive (after subsequent reruns) gets its name appended by .drive with each retry. Of course, by now, iā€™m nuking and repaving, but this experience reminds me of Leopard (which was the worst! ). Anyone know what is actually needed ā€œfreewiseā€ or will it all be Nuke and Pave for these close quarters.(clearly, i donā€™t trust the OS reporting-) As a side comment - do you think Next Yearā€™s OS will be OS13? or OS12.1?