{"id":42470,"date":"2024-03-12T15:01:38","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T19:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=42470"},"modified":"2024-03-26T15:36:10","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T19:36:10","slug":"mac-stuck-in-recovery-after-login","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/12\/mac-stuck-in-recovery-after-login\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac Stuck in Recovery After Login"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After writing on my <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/22\/2023-six-colors-apple-report-card\/\">report card<\/a> that all my Apple hardware was working reliably, I&rsquo;ve now started having what may be hardware trouble with my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. Sometimes, whether I&rsquo;m using it or it&rsquo;s just sitting there, it will let out the <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/23\/the-big-sur-sneeze\/\">sneeze<\/a> sound and kernel panic. This Mac has always done that, but it used to be rare and seemingly without consequences..<\/p>\n<p>Now, I&rsquo;ve had multiple instances where the SSV was reported as damaged and so I had to reinstall macOS.<\/p>\n<p>Other times, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/mac\/comments\/vvn0ry\/2020_m1_macbook_pro_keeps_on_restarting_after_i\/\">after entering my password at the login screen<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/discussions.apple.com\/thread\/253602717?sortBy=best\">instead of logging me in<\/a> it will go to Recovery. Once that happens, future boots on that same partition will keep going to Recovery. I can only log in using a different partition. The kernel panic logs show a variety of problems, from &ldquo;possible memory corruption&rdquo; to &ldquo;panicked task&rdquo; to possible Touch Bar issues, and the active processes range from WiFiAgent to WebKit.<\/p>\n<p>Reinstalling macOS does fix this login problem, but it takes a long time, and eventually the problem comes back. Oddly, I&rsquo;ve also found that a <a href=\"https:\/\/support.apple.com\/guide\/mac-help\/start-up-your-mac-in-safe-mode-mh21245\/mac\">safe boot<\/a> <em>also<\/em> temporarily fixes the problem. This was surprising to me because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ending up in Recovery seemed like a more serious problem than bypassing login items would fix.<\/li>\n<li>A login item shouldn&rsquo;t be able to cause a kernel panic, and the panic logs did not seem to implicate any of my apps.<\/li>\n<li>This Mac is a clone of my main Mac, so it has all the same login items, which have never caused problems there.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But the safe boot <em>does<\/em> allow the Mac to boot, though (until I reinstall macOS) logging in will continue to fail unless I do a safe boot every time. As I said, the login items seemed innocuous, but after manually unchecking all of them in System Settings I could then boot the Mac <em>without<\/em> safe mode. I haven&rsquo;t yet bothered to bisect and figure out which login item is triggering the problem, which at root I believe to be a hardware issue.<\/p>\n<p>With this workaround in place, the MacBook Pro seems to still be usable for testing the Intel versions of my apps, but I no longer really trust it as a backup Mac.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, it&rsquo;s now gotten to the point where I have to do a safe boot every time, even with all the login items disabled. And it won&rsquo;t install the macOS 14.4 update. Either with Software Update or a manually downloaded installer package, will report the update as damaged. I suspect there&rsquo;s some sort of <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Sam_Ohanaware\/status\/1766962431149158469\">internal SSD damage<\/a>, which is a shame because that&rsquo;s not easily serviceable. It does work fine with semi-clean macOS installations on an external SSD, so my next step is to get a larger external SSD and make a clone.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/22\/2023-six-colors-apple-report-card\/\">2023 Six Colors Apple Report Card<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/23\/the-big-sur-sneeze\/\">The Big Sur Sneeze<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/10\/upgrading-to-a-16-inch-macbook-pro\/\">Upgrading to a 16-inch MacBook Pro<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/14\/the-16-inch-macbook-pro\/\">The 16-inch MacBook Pro<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p id=\"mac-stuck-in-recovery-after-login-update-2024-03-26\">Update (2024-03-26): The Mac seems to work properly now that I&rsquo;ve switched to booting from an external SSD. In order to get that clone set up, I needed to run the macOS installer while booted from a different external SSD. Otherwise, installing macOS on the external SSD would keep failing, seemingly because it was trying to update the recovery partition on the malfunctioning internal SSD.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After writing on my report card that all my Apple hardware was working reliably, I&rsquo;ve now started having what may be hardware trouble with my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. Sometimes, whether I&rsquo;m using it or it&rsquo;s just sitting there, it will let out the sneeze sound and kernel panic. This Mac has always done that, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2024-03-12T19:01:44Z","apple_news_api_id":"07051212-19fa-461d-9bc7-b578805337d8","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2024-03-26T19:36:13Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ABwUSEhn6Rh2bx7V4gFM32A","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2567,500,30,100,2385,2088,2277,1434],"class_list":["post-42470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-kernel-panic","tag-launchd","tag-mac","tag-macbookpro","tag-macos-14-sonoma","tag-macos-recovery","tag-signed-system-volume-ssv","tag-touch-bar"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42470"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42642,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42470\/revisions\/42642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}