Mac no longer boots

I’ve been using my Mac all year without fear. On Tuesday I shut it down as I was going out of town. Today, I tried booting up my Mac and it won't boot.

I tried resetting PRAM and SMC, but no go. I did the command D thing, but no issues reported.

Solution 1:

I’m going to jump out on a limb here and make the assumption that you’re probably a Chrome user and before you went away you updated Chrome.

If so, you're probably the victim of a Chrome updater bug and your issues are not related to your Apple hardware nor a bug with macOS.

NOTE: If you're running Mac OS X El Capitan or later and have not disabled SIP, then this will not be the cause of your problem, in which case you'll need to skip this answer and investigate other causes!

To rectify this, you need to follow these steps:

1. Boot into recovery mode by using the commandR keyboard shortcut upon powering up your Mac.

2. When you see the macOS Utilities window, go to the Utilities menu bar option and select Terminal

3. In terminal, enter the following commands one by one, followed by pressing the enter key (NOTE: If your Mac hard drive is not called Macintosh HD then you will need to change the first command below to reference the name of your hard drive)

   chroot /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD
   rm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle
   mv var var_back
   ln -sh private/var var
   chflags -h restricted /var
   chflags -h hidden /var
   xattr -sw com.apple.rootless "" /var
   

4. Now reboot your Mac.

Further reading:

You may be interested in reading:

• Issue 1007358: Keystone modifies /var
• Chrome Update Impacts Some macOS Systems