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Apple HS security updates issue
FYI – I’ve run into this a number of times now. It seems to affect 10.13.6 (High Sierra) Macs with SSDs. So far, the ones with spinning and fusion drives haven’t exhibited this issue in my experience (yet). It seems to happen frequently when Security Updates to the OS are installed via App Store. This issue seems to be fairly consistent. I ran the newest update yesterday on 10 machines and all 6 with SSDs went through the headache outlined below.
Here’s what happens. You run the update and in installs and restarts and acts like the update is loaded. The Mac boots fine and you continue with your work. But, the next time you shut down and start up again, you get a “white screen of death”. Basically a lot of terminal text on a white screen that culminates in a failure to install part of the OS. You are then prompted to shut down or restart. At this point you have to restart and repeat the process multiple times (over a dozen in some cases).
Finally you get to a screen that is grey with a High Sierra logo and an error message. From here you restart again. This last one usually takes. Once you are finally up, run App Store again and you’ll see that the original Security Update never installed and needs to be updated again. Run the update and let it restart as part of this process. Now, once you are back up, shut down and start up again. All should be OK at this point. Check the App Store and the security update should show up as installed.
So far, I haven’t seen this (yet) on Mojave machines with SSDs.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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3 Replies
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I have run in to this too. I only have SSDs on all machines so I can’t test it on other boot drives, but this has happened 3 or 4 times across 5 machines all still on High Sierra. I have come to not install the security updates, or at least I wait a long time until I know I can dedicate a lot of time in case of failure.
I find booting in to safe mode (hold shift when starting) and then a restart after that can sometimes fix it more quickly.
It’s an odd and super annoying problem.
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I ran into something similar, but for me on a Mac Pro 5,1 (2012) The machine would not restart. It just hung at black after running the update. I forced shut down and restarted fine, but I couldn’t get the Security update to install. I have a Samsung 850 Pro SSD as my start up volume. Finally, I bit the bullet, I have a cloned back up and wiped the drive and did a clean install to Mojave 10.4.4. So far so good. After two days of reinstalling all software and plugins, everything runs smoothly.
Warren Eig
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I noticed that two days later Apple posted the same security update (same version number) again. I ran the App Store update again this morning on 10 machines and everything worked fine. My guess is that the two prior postings of the same version were in fact bad patches or bad installers that made it through their QA process. I suppose that much like other software companies, occasionally a bad patch gets through.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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