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Disaster Recovery Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

24 January 2023

Sunday morning we waltzed down to the bunker to go through the news online as we warmed up with a cappuccino only to find our backup laptop (and Sunday driver) was stuck on a restart. The crash report mentioned a missing library file but that file is not on our production box either.

We'd left it doing a security update recommended by Howard Oakley's Silent Knight, which we'd just done on the production box without incident. But it was taking longer on the backup MacBook Pro so we went to bed.

SYMPTOMS

We'd been having a mysterious issue with that laptop for a few days. Almost every morning it would have restarted during the night. The crash report mentioned warmd but that didn't shed much light on the issue.

Sometimes after an update we have to re-apply the OpenCore Legacy Patcher root patches that make running Monterey on unsupported hardware possible. So we tried that. But the OpenCore installer complained it couldn't downgrade.

Downgrade? We were running macOS 12.6.2 and the installer was 12.6.2. What downgrade?

We were booting off a USB stick with the OpenCore installer and off an external drive with an older version of Monterey. So we could see the internal drive and access its data. We just couldn't boot from it.

Sunday is a busy day around here. We make brunch, we do the laundry, we clean the house, we drive over to Mom's to make sure she takes her medication and has a hot meal and clean up the place (which we do every day these days) and we come home to put the laundry away.

Before the day was done, we rebuilt the installer with 12.6.3, which had just become available, and tried again, letting it run overnight.

THE PROBLEM

It failed with the same complaint. It couldn't downgrade.

So we did a little system forensics, poking around at plists until we found a reference to macOS 13.1.

Oh no.

OpenCore is great stuff but it hasn't been revised to support Ventura macOS 13.1 on non-metal GPUs like ours. We know that and have no desire to try running Ventura on this hardware. We know, even if OpenCore eventually supports it, we'll lose some valuable functionality, like Bluetooth.

But somehow, Ventura had been installed on our backup box.

In System Preferences, we had experimented with the "Automatically keep my Mac up to date" option of Software Update. That always shows Venura with a big "Update Now" button, even though Apple should be smart enough to know our system won't support even Catalina.

Was that the culprit? Had Ventura been downloaded to our laptop and been trying to install itself every night?

DOWNGRADING

Downgrading was not going to be simple because we rely on OpenCore Legacy Patcher to install the operating system. And, you know, it didn't want to downgrade.

To cut to the chase, for the first time since running Macintoshes (which goes back to the Macintosh SE), we had to erase the internal drive, install a fresh copy of the operating system and restore our data from our Time Machine backup.

Our backup strategy mirrors data changes as soon as they are made on the two laptops and an external drive. And once a week, when the dust settles, we make a Time Machine backup of both systems to a network drive.

So we had the previous week's system backup on Time Machine with updates to any data on an external drive. We wouldn't lose anything by erasing and restoring.

But it wasn't going to be easy. Which is why we're detailing this for you.

RESTORING

With a freshly erased internal drive, the 12.6.3 OpenCore Legacy Patcher had no trouble installing Monterey and the root patches that laptop requires this Monday morning.

We had a very uncomfortable feeling running a fresh copy of Monterey, though. The same feeling we have in the Apple Store when we try out a new Mac. Nothing works the way we like.

It wasn't just utilities like Keyboard Maestro that were missing. We couldn't even pair our Magic Mouse. And the trackpad didn't recognize all of our gestures and taps. Little things that drive you crazy.

Reistalling macOS was trouble-free if disturbing. But getting the data off the Time Machine backup, however, was going to be another trial.

As we've already confessed, we haven't used Time Machine for a complete restore before. We have used it to restore single files, of course. Very handy. But a complete restore? Nope.

To complicate things, our backup was on a network drive connected to our TP-Link router (which, BTW, has been spectacular is streaming video and data).

Entering Time Machine and selecting files to restore simply didn't work. We got permissions errors from Time Machine (really?) and the process failed to complete.

We had tried Migration Assistant during the macOS install but it couldn't find the network drive. When we tried it after installation, it had the same problem.

WHAT WORKED

We won't detail all of our misguided attempts to restore our data and system behavior. It's as painful for us to relive as it would be to read.

But we will tell you what worked.

Migration Assistant

The first trick was to use Migration Assistant rather than Time Machine to restore our system. We were, in short, setting up a new Mac.

Open Core

Migration Assistant was hanging, though. The reason was OpenCore's root patches. We learned, searching the messages on the OpenCore community forum, that you have to disable the patches to run Migration Assistant.

Once we did that using OpenCore Legacy Patcher, we could run Migration Assistant. But it still couldn't find our network drive.

USB

So we took the network drive off the network and plugged it into one of the MacBook Pro's USB ports.

Time Machine had been able to recognize the backups but not Migration Assistant.

Mount Sparse Bundle

So we helped it along by double clicking on the sparse bundle for the MacBook Pro (BTW, the Sharing name and the bundle name must be the same) to mount it on the Desktop of the MacBook Pro.

And Migration Assistant found it and started the process that, once again, we left to run overnight.

SUCCESS

When we checked on the laptop this morning, Migration Assistant had finished, reporting a few files had not been transferred. We'll chase that down as we come across them.

One such perhaps was all the Security & Privacy settings. We had to get a few of those cooking right off the bat.

And we had to reinstall the OpenCore root patches.

But the laptop looks and behaves the same as before, which is a great comfort after this nightmare into vanilla macOS and Ventura on unsupported hardware.


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