Catalina WWDC beta on MBA 2018 - install hangs/freezes

[martin_hamilton]

Hey there, brave Catalina beta testers!

I thought I would give Catalina a spin on a 2018 Macbook Air we use for testing stuff:

Everything seems to be fine, but then just as the machine is nearly done installing (progress bar around 3/4 complete) it freezes - clue here is that the animation on the asynchronous progress indicator (throbber) stops. I wondered if anyone else has seen this?

When I reboot into Recovery my drive volumes check out as OK under Disk First Aid, can be mounted OK, and I'm able to open up a shell in Terminal and interact with the filesystems. Catalina appears to have successfully created and populated the new system volume partition

If I try reinstalling from Recovery with logging enabled, there aren't any messages displayed in the run up to the freeze, and nothing untoward beforehand. The installer doesn't seem to work with verbose boot, so nothing much I can glean from this

I have tried leaving the machine overnight in case it's just taking its time, but all that happens is the screen blanker kicks in, and then it refuses to wake up again - the backlight is still on, but the machine needs power cycling to reanimate

I'm happy to do some more testing/debugging to help get to the bottom of this...

Cheers,

Martin

 

[martin_hamilton]

OK, so here's what I did to get things working...

Fired up Recovery (hold down Command-R on boot)
Deleted the two drive volumes created by the Catalina installer
Created single new APFS volume (formatted, but empty)

Now the installer works just fine from Recovery, and I'm typing this from my Macbook now with Catalina - woo

So it looks like something in my original install was making it barf when I tried to do an upgrade - I had wondered if it was a LaunchDaemon/LaunchAgent script, zapping these made no different. Happy now though with a clean install, so that's good

In case anyone was foolish enough to install the Catalina beta without having taken a backup (not me, obviously... ahem) then said hypothetical person could always open up a Terminal in Recovery and use scp to copy important files to another Unix system. Recovery doesn't include rsync, but you could always copy it from /usr/bin on another Mac