Today was one of my weirdest days with MacOS:
I have a 2019 MacbookPro with DualBoot Monterey (Main) – and Ventura (for DAW compatibility tests) and suddenly my Monterey partition is stuck in a startup loop, traditional methods as SMC or NVRAM reset did not work, and after digging deep I noticed it now has a Sonoma Version number.
What did I do today:
Just 4 days ago I updated the Monterey partition to the latest Monterey version and before starting my work today, I restarted from my working monterey into Ventura partition and updated that partition to the latest ventura version.
After doing that I tried to switch back to monterey, but my mac got caught in an endless startup loop when trying to get into monterey, nevertheless the ventura partition had no problem in starting up.
So I went through the typical: reset SMC, reset NVRAM, still a bootup loop for monterey, no problem with ventura partition. I tried to reinstall Monterey on it’s partition via internet: Preflight error 21…
I made a Install media with Monterey installer, tried to reinstall monterey on that partition and got message “cannot downgrade”…
Cannot downgrade from monterey to monterey?
Then it struck me: I went into choose startup media and indeed the monterey partition is marked with a Sonoma Version 14.5 as it’s OS version (not 12.7.5 (21H1222) (May 13, 2024) as it should). It’s not even the Ventura version I just updated, no Sonoma 14.5
So I went into: System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist and indeed it’s marked as 14.5 (Change Date of the file is 7th May 2024)…
This leaves me completely blank…
Does anyone have a hint on if I can edit the file manually? I have a time machine backup from approx beginning of may. nevertheless I’d like to bring it up running again, and at the moment my only viable choice would be to upgrade it to sonoma.
How the heck did that happen???
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>BuildID</key>
<string>4805124E-0C37-11EF-BC27-82EAA8E0F66E</string>
<key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
<string>23F79</string>
<key>ProductCopyright</key>
<string>1983-2024 Apple Inc.</string>
<key>ProductName</key>
<string>macOS</string>
<key>ProductUserVisibleVersion</key>
<string>14.5</string>
<key>ProductVersion</key>
<string>14.5</string>
<key>iOSSupportVersion</key>
<string>17.5</string>
</dict>
</plist>
