Warning: Big Sur Erased My SSD

[Theophilos]

Hello,

I have a 2019 Mac Pro that was running the latest version of Catalina. Today, after downloading Big Sur and letting the installer finish, I watched as my Mac restarted, but it went into Recovery mode and asked me to enter my password to unlock Macintosh HD. To my surprise, my password didn’t work. I tried my user account password as well as my iCloud password, since the drive was encrypted by Filevault, but the passwords didn’t work! I tried changing the keyboard layout as recommended in a Reddit post, but nothing worked. My correct password was not able to unlock the drive.

Then, I noticed that the drive was... empty. After getting into Disk Utility, the free space was 1.76 TB out of 2 TB. My drive didn’t have that much free space before Big Sur.

I tried calling Apple Support, but it is limited, undoubtedly because of COVID and the release of Big Sur.

Sadly, I had no option other than to erase Macintosh HD using Disk Utility and reinstalling Big Sur, which currently has 59 minutes left! Afterwards, I’ll have to use Migration Assistant to bring over the data from my latest Time Machine backup.

What a mess...

Apple, I know one of your employees is scanning these forums. I am really disappointed in this botched release. It’s one thing to mess up the actual release as was widely publicized today, but it’s another to deliver a shoddy “upgrade” that potentially wipes drives and locks users out of their hard drives. I found several threads with similar experiences via Google. Someone carrying a grain of salt might say, “It’s your fault, because you installed a major OS upgrade on Day 1,” but my answer is, “Weren’t there at least 9 developer and public betas?” As far as I’m concerned, the software should be out of beta by the time it’s released to customers.

Again, what a sad mess...

 

[Marli]

for me it didnt erase or lock anything, except I cant for the life of me get the iMac to boot the external SSD I want to use as the boot drive.. It seems to do all the right things, but it just always boots the internal drive.

 

[coso]

for me it didnt erase or lock anything, except I cant for the life of me get the iMac to boot the external SSD I want to use as the boot drive.. It seems to do all the right things, but it just always boots the internal drive.

Did you check this? https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/big-sur-on-external-ssd.2267681/post-29228459

 

[Marli]

Yep, I dont have any boot security enabled.

 

[blackquartz]

Jesus, this happened to me as well, i don't really want to erase my files, has anyone found a work around this issue?

 

[blackquartz]

solved, used this steps listed on apples developers forum.

--
First step. Reboot into Recovery mode, by holding down the Command and R keys. You'll see the four options. Instead go up to the menu and go to terminal.

In terminal type the following (be sure and type a space after rm)

rm “/Volumes/Macintosh HD/var/db/.applesetupdone.”

then type reboot and reset NVRAM

You will then be able to create a new user and then enable your existing account to be able to administer the computer. This works.
--

 

[Theophilos]

Great job! I hope it helps others.

 

[12vLego]

Hello,

I have a 2019 Mac Pro that was running the latest version of Catalina. Today, after downloading Big Sur and letting the installer finish, I watched as my Mac restarted, but it went into Recovery mode and asked me to enter my password to unlock Macintosh HD. To my surprise, my password didn’t work. I tried my user account password as well as my iCloud password, since the drive was encrypted by Filevault, but the passwords didn’t work! I tried changing the keyboard layout as recommended in a Reddit post, but nothing worked. My correct password was not able to unlock the drive.

Then, I noticed that the drive was... empty. After getting into Disk Utility, the free space was 1.76 TB out of 2 TB. My drive didn’t have that much free space before Big Sur.

I tried calling Apple Support, but it is limited, undoubtedly because of COVID and the release of Big Sur.

Sadly, I had no option other than to erase Macintosh HD using Disk Utility and reinstalling Big Sur, which currently has 59 minutes left! Afterwards, I’ll have to use Migration Assistant to bring over the data from my latest Time Machine backup.

What a mess...

Apple, I know one of your employees is scanning these forums. I am really disappointed in this botched release. It’s one thing to mess up the actual release as was widely publicized today, but it’s another to deliver a shoddy “upgrade” that potentially wipes drives and locks users out of their hard drives. I found several threads with similar experiences via Google. Someone carrying a grain of salt might say, “It’s your fault, because you installed a major OS upgrade on Day 1,” but my answer is, “Weren’t there at least 9 developer and public betas?” As far as I’m concerned, the software should be out of beta by the time it’s released to customers.

Again, what a sad mess...

I have had about the same problem; started the BS installation and ended up being stuck in recovery mode (giving hard disk password errors and lack-of-administrator-warnings). It feels almost as bad as getting a virus-infection warning from the system.

Probably I had to set all the Mac drives/login security to zero (via the security tool of Recovery mode) BEFORE starting updating... Apple should have issued a warning, or -better- an improved installation process that takes into account system passwords and admin permissions etc. Now I am forced to start from scratch, erasing the main drive and transfer my data from a backup.

a sad mess indeed