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Powerbooky

macrumors demi-god
Original poster
Mar 15, 2008
679
612
Europe
Here's a post describing my "adventure" trying to restore macOS Ventura with all its user accounts from a previous TimeMachine backup.

A few weeks ago I tried to install Sonoma on my MacPro 2008 (3.1), which did not go well. While Sonoma did run and most applications worked fine, wifi and bluetooth however didn't. Apple Music always crashed when selecting the AirPlay button, sometimes without doing anything. Sonoma just didn't work for me.

So I did a couple of attempts of reinstalling Ventura (13.6.9), restoring from TimeMachine and all ended up in a nasty infinite bootloop after each time Migration Assistant was finished.
After some browsing around on Reddit and MR, I found a couple of suggestions. Clearing the NVRAM was the first cause of the boot loop.
Second, apparently the applied root patches cause Migration Assistant to corrupt a lot of the system. The suggestion was to remove the root patches before starting the Migration Assistant. Normally you can't do that with an OCLP patched USB installer, so I tried to install Ventura unpatched but boot with a OCLP EFI from a different USB drive. The installation did finish, but after 6 hours waiting for the Migration Assistant to finish copying from TimeMachine network share, nothing was actually copied. No applications, no user data, nothing. Only the user accounts were created,
Then I tried the fully patched Ventura installer. After the clean install, I created a temporary admin user to remove the root patches and start the Migration Assistant. Again I left Migration Assistant do its work overnight, only to find out the next day that again nothing was copied... again!
Then I tried an earlier version of Ventura (13.6.6), again created a temporary admin user to remove the patches and start the MA. This time the Migration Assistant did finish properly and all data was copied! But... when I tried to access my TimeMachine backup to look for an older version of a file, I could not access it. The Migration Assistant had changed the USER_ID of all the users. So had to do the whole restore again, but this time without restoring the first user, which is on my Mac's always the admin account. That worked, all the normal users kept their original USER_ID.


In short the whole procedure:

  1. create a USB installer with OCLP 1.5 and Ventura 13.6.6
    (though OCLP 1.5 dialog show 13.6.2 - apparently some error in a plist inside the installers)
  2. connect a wired Apple keyboard with mouse directly to the USB port on the MacPro
  3. turn on the MacPro and clear NVRAM (cmd+option+P+R)
  4. install Ventura 13.6.6 clean with OCLP 1.5 (2.0.x wasn't released yet)
  5. setup the first user clean, which for me is always the admin account.
  6. then do the upgrade to 13.6.9
  7. after reboot ignore the OCLP message about reinstalling the rootpatches
  8. Start the Migration Assistant.
  9. start the restore of all accounts from the TimeMachine storage except the admin account
    this ensures that all accounts keep their original USER_ID or else I cannot access older TimeMachine snapshots. (my TimeMachine goes back a little beyond one year)
  10. after reboot, install the OCLP root patches again
  11. Re-pair my wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse
    I just could not get that working properly with Sonoma
  12. disconnect the wired keyboard/mouse.
    Leaving no USB 1.x port in use, as I have a way faster USB 3.0 card installed anyway
  13. leave the Mac on for a few hours to let the indexing run
HDMI audio didn't work, but ever since Big Sur I had not worked anyway. It only worked after the first reboot when the root patches were installed. Later reboots the HDMI audio output was always gone. Until I installed OCLP 2.0.1 today... fingers crossed that it keeps on working now.

Also I found that OWC's SoftRAID 7.5 application now works. In the previous Big Sur and Ventura, the application always crashed. The driver itself and the monitor daemon worked fine but I just could not open the app. Last year I contacted OWC about this, but even with all the logs they could not find what caused the crash. Apparently a clean install was the answer.

I did change a couple of the OCLP 2.0.1 settings from default for the MacPro 3,1 template when I upgraded to OCLP 2.0.1:
  • turn off the 4-core workaround option
    don't know why OCLP doesn't do this automatically for any OS Sonoma and older
  • turn on "disable the mediaanalysisd service" option
    I found that whenever the Mac was idle for a while, or when rebooted or shutdown, there were kernel panics caused by mediaanalysisd.

I hope this post helps others and maybe the OCLP developers.
 
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