Catalina Beta 7 bricked my Macbook Pro
I have installed macOS Catalina Beta 7 on my MacBook Pro Late 2013. After installing, my Mac prompted me to Restart. While installing the update I noticed that the Apple Logo with the progress bar disappeared. Shortly after, the screen went black and the Macbook froze. I tried a hard reset, but it keeps booting to the "question mark" folder. I tried several boot up methods, clearing NVRAM, starting in safe mode etc, but the Mac simply ignores my keyboard inputs while starting up. My guess is that the Firmware / EFI got corrupt because I can't use any of the key combinations. I can only boot to the question mark folder.
Does anyone have any recommendations or ideas? Thanks in advance and sorry for my bad English :) !
Solution 1:
I had the same experience with my MacBookAir. Turns out Catalina killed the firmware and the only solution according to the Genius Bar is to replace the motherboard. That is around 500 Bucks in my case.
Solution 2:
Boot to Internet Recovery and erase / install is the best path when any update happens. In the vast, vast majority of cases you will be fine and only Macs with T2 chip would need an assist to re-flash the EFI. Yours is amenable to target mode boot and all the normal ways to reinstall the OS when it’s not bootable from the internal drive.
- Reset the SMC one time - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295
- Internet Recovery would work for newer Macs - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314 - your mac needs you to bring a bootable USB or drive to it or to connect in Target Disk Mode to another mac to image it / run the installer against your storage.
Solution 3:
There are few possible scenarios.
1) Seems like your mac equivalent of bios is updated to not accept any previously supported boot methods. (Less likely).
2) The new boot loader is not allowing your “outdated” system for Catalina. (Thanks to Apple). If you were able to install previous beta versions of Catalina, this is also very less likely.
3)Your Boot partition is simply messed up during a restart or something.
My suggestion is to make a USB installer of the supported OS. You’d need a separate working system for that involving a free utility called DosDude.
Hopefully, you’d be able to install the previous supported stable OS (10.14.6) without formatting the HDD.
UPDATE:
There is one hack (I'm not sure about MBP) but I experienced few years (some 20 years ago) on an unbranded desktop is to take out the battery (2032 battery cell which is found on motherboard) and place it again after few seconds. This is how we used to reset the motherboard.
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1) Take out your HDD out of your MBP and connect it with as an external drive with some working computer. (TAKE THE BACKUP) and Format the HDD. Probably now, it won't have any issues with your computer.
2) If it still doesn't work, your BIOS firmware is corrupted. SMC firmware can be updated or downgraded. Follow these instructions.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202040
You can find relative downloads on this page
https://support.apple.com/downloads/macnotebooks
Good Luck!