iATKOS | United Kingdom

So where do I begin?

The last time I tried to update my late 2013 MBP 11,1 was about a year ago. I simply wanted to advance to Ventura so that I could update my Microsoft stack. I’m pretty good at following instructions, can R TFM and can certainly benefit from a good YouTube tutorial. Nevertheless I screwed it up, had to completely re image my laptop and lost my bootcamp drive in the process.

Undaunted, I created a new bootcamp. Installed Windows 10…even bought a licence.

I was understandably petrified about doing this again, so it took me a year to retry, but retry I did.

This time it went slightly better. I managed to get Ventura installed….mostly. It wouldn’t do the root patches….complained about not being able to mount the volume. Therefore I had no graphics acceleration and the screen and font was stuck at the default tiny (in fact giant) resolution.

Rebooting required the USB stick, the EFI could not be installed onto the HD. I had an unworkable solution.

Worse than that, each restart would fail at what I assume was the driver load section (about 35% along the progress bar after entering by credentials). This is bypassed by pressing the shift key….it progresses to the slow unworkable, unaccelerated Ventura.

“Why don’t I try and install Sequoia from this broken Ventura to see what happens?” I stupidly asked. Well, what happens is it successfully makes a Sequoia boot USB, but I’m left without any EFI anywhere, so the machine goes to the support.apple.com/mac/startup screen.

From there I was able to do cmd-R and enter the restore menu, from which I see that the main volume is no longer mounted. See the picture above.

Is there anything that I can do? Clicking on mount doesn’t work. I have a Mac Mini M2pro to aid with recovery. I’m hoping that there is a terminal command that can get me back to a state where I can remount that volume and then reinstall the latest supported version.

At the moment I have a 250Gb computer that fails over to Windows 10 on a 50Gb partition. Far from ideal.

Help me Reddit fam, you’re my only hope.