Hi Folks, I wonder if someone can help. Apologies for the length of this post...
I've a iMac 27" 5k Late 2014 (15,1). After spending last Saturday opening it up, installing a 1TB blade NVMe SSD I felt pretty pleased with myself. No screen breaks, all good. Drive was recognised, etc. Thanks iFixit.
So to bring the whole system up to date, I wanted it to run Sonoma. I downloaded OCLP 1.4.1, created a bootable Thumb drive with Sonoma 14.4 on it, and off I went.
Most of Sunday was spent trying to get that all to work. Now maybe this had something to do with me 'splitting' the root Fusion Drive by installing the new blade SSD, but it just wouldn't install. I tried a clean install on the blade drive, formatted it with APFS, and spent much time watching bars crawl across the screen. At first, the iMac wouldn't boot from the thumb drive. But after a few restarts it did. Then the installer would hang, and, well, after multiple attempts I got an installation -- it got to the crucial 1%, etc. phase of the installation, auto rebooted and then had the internal blade drive listed as a startup disk. It was auto-selected, and then just as I sensed victory was mine, it froze. Kernel panic.
So I looked online, and saw a couple of YouTube videos -- Mr Macintosh and Jessie's Flying. Both of these related to a Mac getting stuck after upgrading the Root Patch (mine was a clean install), but whatever. I tried to follow their instructions, but I couldn't get the Mac to start off the recovery partition of the 1 TB blade drive (and yes I selected the EFI on boot first). So, long story short, I booted from a network drive, installed some ancient version of the OS onto the 3TB Hard Disk Drive (the former Fusion Drive) and after a crap load of faff, managed to update that to Big Sur.
I then booted off the recovery partition of the Big Sur 3TB drive with a view to typing the Terminal commands recommended by Mr Macintosh and Jessie's Flying. But, well, here's where I ran into further problems.
After trying to mount my 1Tb Blade drive I got the error message 'Unknown special file of file system'. So, I'm guessing, the recovery partition on Big Sur didn't recognise a drive (or had some problem with a drive) created by a Sonoma installer?
So I gave that up. Rebooted again, selected the EFI Partition, then selected the blade drive on to which I'd just installed Sonoma, and started it in Safe Mode. Success! It booted -- I went through Set Up. I then ran OC Legacy Patcher, did a post-install of the Root Patcher, Rebuilt the EFI partition for good measure. Rebooted and, success! Sonoma started. No Safe Mode. I rebooted again, selected my blade drive, nice quick boot! Finally! I thought, I've done it... I grabbed myself a Leffe and toasted to a job well done...
That's when the fun started. A couple of restarts later I started to get the hang on startup. Now just to be clear, I had control-selected the EFI partition of the Blade Drive (not the Thumb Drive or anything like that) as the default 'startup disk', and then control-selected the Blade Drive on the following screen as the default drive from which to boot. And it would hang, and hang, and hang.
So then I tried resetting the NVRAM, selected the EFI boot, and the blade drive, and it would still hang.
I tried the same step once more, and this time ... it booted! WTF?
So maybe a glitch? A few reboots later, we're back to the same stuff, hanging a startup. I worry about trouble ahead, this just isn't a stable solution. So I found a workaround, or what I thought was a workaround. I installed an EFI partition on the 3TB Internal Hard drive. Selected that at startup, then booted from the blade drive. That worked, for a while. And then after another couple of restarts I'm back to the freezes at startup. It gets to like 1% of the progress bar and then just hangs indefinitely. My only answer is to boot the blade drive in safe mode, reinstall the Root Patch and EFI partition, restart and then, after a few attempts, it boots.
So this morning I came into the use the Mac and it had crashed overnight -- black screen and warning beep every time I press a key. I boot into safe mode, and then see an opportunity to end my woes. OCLP 1.4.2 has been released! Maybe this is the fix? So I install it, reboot and we're back to the freeze at startup. The air turns blue.
Next I try to boot off the Thumb Drive (the Sonoma installer) to see if I can fix the disk or get access to the Terminal app from there to run the comments recommended to 'bless' the last sealed snapshot, but it doesn't boot from the Thumb drive! I get the same 1% freeze on boot.
So last resort, I boot the Blade Drive in safe mode. Go into Terminal and try the commands to mount and bless the last saved state. And I get the message 'Invalid Special File or File System'.
So, and I can't believe I didn't try this earlier, I rebooted again, this time into the only recovery partition that works (Big Sur Recovery on the Hard Drive). I tried some disk first aid on the Blade SSD. And it found a problem with a snapshot, which it said it fixed. I was worried that the 'fix' might be incompatible with OCLP and/or Big Sur, and maybe it was, for when I tried to boot again, guess what? The Blade Drive froze on startup.
So after much further faff. Resetting the NVRAM, booting into Sonoma in Safe Mode (after selecting the EFI partition on my blade drive) and once again doing a Post-Install Root Patch and rebuild of Open Core on the Blade drive. I reboot and, finally, this time it boots.
And here I am typing this Tolstoy-esque account of my woes with OCLP. I'm obviously doing something stupidly wrong, and I could really use some help from folks who properly understand this stuff.
In the background I'm getting OCLP 1.4.2 to create a new Thumb Drive installer of with Sonoma 14.3.1 on it. And my plan for this weekend (if I get that far!) is to blank the Blade drive, do a clean install of Sonoma 14.3.1. Then update via Software Update, then restore all my stuff using a Time Machine backup.
But maybe someone has a better idea? My best guess is that there's a kernel extension that is not playing well with my iMac and if I knew which one that was that would be the fix. I've tried removing both 'HighPoint' kexts a la the Troubleshooting suggestions on the OCLP support pages (it also suggests removing softRAID, but I can't find that anywhere). I did that manually by dragging them out of their containing folders and into the trash after enabling root. But that makes no difference. So I'm really not sure what else to try.
If you've got this far into my rambling message, I applaud you! Can anyone help?
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