Ben inadvertently clicked to install a security update no his macbook – which turned out to be a full Big Sur upgrade. Even though it can, theoretically run it, in practice he keeps the HDD so full of crap that there isn’t any room to update properly and then everything falls over. I’ve already had to do one full reinstall, and even though I was kinda-sorta more clued in to what I needed to do, the damn thing fought me all along the way. I ended up staying up until 1am this morning, trying to get it fixed. Booting from USB barfed just near the end because of corrupted media. Recovery-over-the-internet gave an alphabet soup of error codes. I managed to recover an old TimeMachine backup from my old mac – but then realized that I didn’t remember my account password.
I started again this morning with a clearer head. I managed to download Catalina and create new boot media during the night last night. This morning, I tried to force reinstall, and that sort of worked, except it upgraded the version I couldn’t log into. I nuked that installation and then started the installation from USB.
IT. TOOK. FOREVER.
The time estimation is a joke.
It stayed at “3 minutes remaining” for just under an hour.
And then just like that, it started to do something again. Ben’s screen is a toxic waste dump.
And again, it got stuck at “3 minutes remaining” for about 30-40 minutes again.
And huzzah, I got it working. The 1st thing I did was to take a full TimeMachine backup so that if/when he borks it again, I have a stable restore point – because if I have to go through this shit again, the macbook will take a flying leap out the patio door.