Computer won't boot after El Capitan Public Beta 4

Question

I just installed El Capitan Public Beta 4 on a Late 2011 MBP. It stalled during restart. Any suggestions other than a Time Machine retore?

Beta
macOS

11k

Posted by

Twocircles

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Answer 1

The following is a condensation of what worked for Twocircles to revive the system:

NVRAM Reset:

Shut down the computer.
Hold down Command, Option (left side), P and R keys while you switch on and continue holding them until you hear the restart sound a second time.
You should now be able to boot into Recovery Mode (cmd+R)

In Recovery Mode:

Central Pane > Disk Utility > Select whole internal drive > First Aid
Repeat for the El Capitan partition (default is Macintosh HD)
Central Pane > You can now Re-Install OS X without losing your user data.

If you have trouble connecting to the Internet, don't use wifi - connect by Ethernet cable instead.

Be patient - the reinstall can take time. Afterwards you will be back on Public Beta 1. You will need to update back through 2 and 3 before 4 becomes available. However it may be best not to install Beta 4 again. The next Beta is likely to be a combo update, which will incorporate all changes from betas 2 through 5. That would be a less risky time to update.

Posted by

Max108

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Answer 2

In the end, I made a bootable El Capitan installer on an 8GB usb drive and used that to reinstall the OS without erasing the hard drive. Maybe not the cleanest solution but I now have a working Mac. 🙂

Posted by

jgonzalezmilburn

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Answer 3

What happened to all the content here? There were about a hundred entries including a way to recover, but it did not solve the problem.

Posted by

Twocircles

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Answer 4

Hi Twocircles,

While trying to clean up this thread (it was getting really squashed) I accidentally deleted most of the useful posts too 😊 ... I'm about to construct a single answer of the steps that worked for you. I'll post it in a minute.

In the meantime, yes, you can set your boot to be always verbose (and this will apply to some of the install too) with the following command in Terminal:

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Max.

Posted by

Max108

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Answer 5

The following is a condensation of what worked for Twocircles to revive the system:

NVRAM Reset:

Shut down the computer.
Hold down Command, Option (left side), P and R keys while you switch on and continue holding them until you hear the restart sound a second time.
You should now be able to boot into Recovery Mode (cmd+R)

In Recovery Mode:

Central Pane > Disk Utility > Select whole internal drive > First Aid
Repeat for the El Capitan partition (default is Macintosh HD)
Central Pane > You can now Re-Install OS X without losing your user data.

If you have trouble connecting to the Internet, don't use wifi - connect by Ethernet cable instead.

Be patient - the reinstall can take time. Afterwards you will be back on Public Beta 1. You will need to update back through 2 and 3 before 4 becomes available. However it may be best not to install Beta 4 again. The next Beta is likely to be a combo update, which will incorporate all changes from betas 2 through 5. That would be a less risky time to update.

Posted by

Max108

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Answer 6

This actually occured on the Public Beta 4 upgrade, which I guess is identical to Developer Beta 6.

I think I will follow your advice and stay with PB 3 until an aggregate upgrade comes out.

Posted by

Twocircles

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Answer 7

Sorry - changed now 🙂

I deal a lot with both - it's easy to swap tracks without realising it 😊

Posted by

Max108

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Computer won't boot after El Capitan Public Beta 4

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