I tried to upgrade my MacBook Pro to High Sierra this week.
Yes, tried — and failed.
Recently, Apple released new versions of all of its operating systems: iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
My Apple TV, Apple Watch, iPhone 8 Plus and iPad Air 2 all took the new operating systems without a hitch.
My early 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro downloaded the macOS just fine.
When the download finished, and the Mac needed to reboot to start the install, all I got was a grey circle with a line through it.
“No High Sierra for you!”
Apple says macOS 10.13 will work with MacBook Pros from 2010 and newer, so I should be good, but I have no idea why the install would not begin.
Not only would the new version not install, I was stuck with a system that wouldn’t do anything at all.
Now what?
I was not able to find any meaningful information about how to fix my particular problem, so my only choice was to restore from my Time Machine backup.
Of course, I didn’t follow my own advice about frequent backups.
I do have an external hard drive I use to backup all my data, but I had not plugged it in for more than a week, so the backup I had didn’t include any data from the last seven days.
I borrowed my wife’s MacBook Pro and connected mine to hers with a Thunderbolt cable. I rebooted my Mac and held down the T key, and my hard drive mounted on her Mac as an external drive so I could back up the few files I’d created in the last week.
I might have been able to delete some of the High Sierra install files and get my system back, but it was late and I had all my data safely backed up or retrieved, so I just decided to restore from my latest backup and move on.
The restore from Time Machine took about 5 hours from my external USB drive.
I let that go overnight, and the next morning I had a working system with all my files back in place.
I’ve been reading about others having trouble with the High Sierra upgrade, and I still haven’t tried again. I needed my Mac to do my weekly writing, so I’ll give it another shot later this week.
My plan is to wipe my drive and start fresh. I’ll let you know how it goes.
If you’ve had issues with Apple’s latest upgrades, I’d love to hear about it. Send me an email.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jim Rossman writes for The Dallas Morning News. He may be reached at jrossman@dallasnews.com.
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