[mac4theblind] Still Trying to recover a Useful System. was Dropdown Menus in Recovery Mode and VO
- From: "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: mac4theblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2020 21:39:43 -0600
"Sarah Alawami" <marrie12@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
I never had that issue. Something is very wrong and you migh thave to do a
clean install. I'm a beta tester for 10.15 and this issue to my knowledge
has not ben reported. I'm thinking somethingn corrupted somewhare.
Oh! That's impossible.
The fact is something in deed did get corrupted.
Representatives at Apple and I have probably spent 3 or 4
hours on the phone the day before Thanksgiving and last Friday,
the 31ST and each time, they had reasonable suggestions but
nobody realized what a dog this problem as turned out to be.
First off, the recovery volume is from Lion. This Mac
was made in late 2012 and Lion was what shipped.
The voiceover voice kind of makes me think of Max
Headroom after a really bad night on the town.
The first Apple suggestion was to use Terminal in
Recovery to erase 1 empty file,
rm "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/var/db/.AppleSetupDone"
Had I been able to do that, I would have rebooted and
been in the setup screen as if this was a new installation. The
account I could have generated would have been an administrative
account. Problem solved. But wait, there's more.
I don't know if the Lion Recovery screen is truncated
just on my system, but there is no way to get in to terminal from
the recovery screen.
With Voiceover turned on, vo+shift W sometimes produces
nothing when you first bring up the Recovery system or when it
reads all the windows, there is no window that one could access
with terminal as an option.
From nothing, we've been going steadily down hill in to
the swamp.
At one time, I brought it up with the possibility to
revert back to Lion.
I sneered at this choice but may have accidentally
deleted something in all my poking and prodding over the last few
days as I can't seem to even bring up that screen any more.
The main screen in all it's useless glory still comes up
if I start with command + r. Command + Shift r is supposed to
let you install Lion again.
It doesn't matter unless I get a functioning system out
of it as I have erased the hard drive which is the only other
alternative Apple had to being able to delete that 1 little file.
It really burns me the amount of time of fiddling and
poking at this system and the hours wasted so far.
What I am hoping to do is use another Mac to generate a
bootable usb drive of mojave.
Does anyone here know if voiceover is part of that
bootable image?
It might just put stuff in order again to install mojave.
There was obviously something berried in the file system
that caused the original issue of the admin account not surviving
the upgrade to catalina.
I'd rather lose my right hand than restore catalina and
the system used to work well up to and including mojave. I never
had it crash on me before I had to crash things because of all
the locks and security theater.
I think I'll go outside and break rocks with my bare
fists and then go play in the traffic for awhile.
In all fairness, I have done several upgrades over the
last 5 years and this is the first one to swarm on me but
it's a dandy.
I think that since this system was originally at the Lion
level, something got lost in the translation through Mountain
Lion and all the versions of MacOS that lead up to the catalina
massacre. I suspect most people hav had no trouble. My only
beaf with Apple is that there's no way to get in and fix a
relatively straight-forward problem to solve in normal unix.
If this is the future, I probably will go somewhere else
for an operating system as I love unix and have always liked it's
robustness. If you learn how it basically works, you can fix it
yourself with confidence.
Martin
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