M2 MacBook Air running Sonoma.
Yesterday I opened up my Mac and it booted into Recovery Mode, which I have never seen before. There was no explanation for why this happened. I used the Mac 30 minutes earlier with no issue, and shut it down and stored it normally.
So, I used Disk Utility to run First Aid on the drive (the main partition, not the recovery one), and it reported no errors and no fixes applied.
I had no alternative but to re-install the OS. But it said “The volume cannot be downgraded.” I knew my free space was low (~9 GB), and guessed that was the problem, so I mounted my Data partition and used Terminal to free up some space, deleting 6 or 7 large apps from ~/Applications (technically, /Volumes/Data/Users/Tom/Applications). Then I rebooted into Recovery Mode and was able to re-install Sonoma from the internet. (I.e. the volume now could be “downgraded.”)
Now the Mac will boot to the normal login screen, but after I enter my credentials, the loading bar starts to fill momentarily (up to ~8%), then the screen goes black with the Apple logo and a progress bar stuck at 2%, and it stays there forever. This is where I’m stuck.
I don’t know how to debug or fix this. My theory is that there’s some login item left over from an app I just deleted (I suspect the Battle.net app, which always asks for sudo during install and updates even though it doesn’t need sudo — I always refuse and yet the app and games work fine). But I can’t manage my login items without logging in, and the Mac won’t complete the login process. I can’t un-delete the apps because rm -rf bypasses Trash.
The Mac will not boot into Safe Mode; when I Shift-Click that button, the screen goes black and it stays that way forever.
I’m afraid to reset PRAM, or similar things, because it seems like this is still the first boot after an OS re-install, and I reckon there may be important finishing steps that remain for first login, and I don’t want to upset that process and brick my computer.
How can I debug the login process and see what’s going wrong?
