I'm pulling my hair out now and I have absolutely no idea how to resolve this peculiar issue. Long story short, I simply cannot load into a fresh install of Mojave.
A bit of background; my MacBook recently had an issue where it wouldn't boot at all. When I turned it on, I could hear the chime and see a dark/grey screen, but that's far as it would get. After a fair bit of troubleshooting I reset the NVRAM and it worked again. After a few days of using High Sierra, I stupidly tried to upgrade to Mojave and this is where the nightmare began. It appeared to install fine, but after restarting, entering my password and loading for the first time it just locks up / turns black near the end of the progress bar. Right, looks like I need to install again - unfortunately not that easy. To summarise what I've tried:
Anything obvious missing? The only thing I can think of trying now is downloading VMware on my gaming PC, creating a VM with Mojave/High Sierra and then creating a proper bootable USB disk.
Failing the above, take it to an authorised repairer?
Please help
A bit of background; my MacBook recently had an issue where it wouldn't boot at all. When I turned it on, I could hear the chime and see a dark/grey screen, but that's far as it would get. After a fair bit of troubleshooting I reset the NVRAM and it worked again. After a few days of using High Sierra, I stupidly tried to upgrade to Mojave and this is where the nightmare began. It appeared to install fine, but after restarting, entering my password and loading for the first time it just locks up / turns black near the end of the progress bar. Right, looks like I need to install again - unfortunately not that easy. To summarise what I've tried:
- Reset NVRAM
- Reset SMC
- Attempted to enter Recovery Mode via cmd+R; screen turns black before progress bar completes - recovery partition corrupted/missing?
- Attempted to run Internet Recovery via cmd+option+R; completes after a 2-3 minute process but then the original issue returns (after logging in the progress bar doesn't finish)
- Ran Hardware Diagnostics; no faults reported
- Oddly I did manage to get to the Recovery Mode options screen via this method. Disk Utility check reported no faults on main partition. Can't see the recovery partition (supports the theory that it's corrupted). I also attempted to reinstall Mojave - again it still doesn't load in.
- Entered Single User Mode and ran fsck -fy; no faults reported
- Tried to boot into Safe Mode; can't even get Safe Mode to run
- Attempted to create a bootable USB drive in Windows with Power ISO and TransMac - neither worked. TransMac doesn't even get as far as burning the DMG to my USB disk. Tried both High Sierra and Mojave DMG's.
Anything obvious missing? The only thing I can think of trying now is downloading VMware on my gaming PC, creating a VM with Mojave/High Sierra and then creating a proper bootable USB disk.
Failing the above, take it to an authorised repairer?
Please help
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