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I have a MacBook Pro 2019 13", I tried to update it to the new Catalina 10.15. And the hell begun!

When the update started the screen went completely black, so I thought it needs me to press the power button, which I did. After a few minutes the log in screen showed up, which was absolutely unexpected of course. So I tried to fill out my password, but it did not take it. I tried it about 20 times, and I am pretty sure the password was right, but it did not let me in. I tried a lot of stuff to fix it and install the update, but nothing worked.

So one of the things I tried was installing from the recovery mode. And it took about 2 hours to get this message:

Mac OS installing error

Sorry for the quality, I was very mad when I took it! Basically it says:

macOS could not be installed on your computer

Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup (-69808)

Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again

I also have an external hard drive with Catalina installed. And it works fine when I connect it to the Mac via USB. I also tried to replicate it from the external drive to internal. Well first of all it posted a lot of errors(which I do not remember), but after I somehow managed to copy the drive Mac failed to boot from the internal drive. It boots from external drive, but the same copy does not boot from the internal.

You may think that the drive is corrupted, but I checked it with diskutils, and it shows it as a completely healthy drive.

By the way Single user mode is somehow unavailable(just does not load to there).

What should I do next to fix the Mac? I need it for work.😞

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    About the password: was it maybe a different keyboard layout? Or the iCloud password instead of the local account? Sorry to hear about this situation – I know this sucks. How did you try to replicate the external drive onto the internal one? In principle this should work. Do you have an old Time Machine backup to get back to 10.14?
    – slhck
    Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 18:37
  • @slhck I checked the keyboard layout and it was correct. Also my iCloud password and MacBook password are similar, and I tried both to log in. I replicated it using Restore feature of diskutils in Recovery mode, it first showed different errors, then somehow worked. And I do not have a Time Machine because I do not have a spare hard drive for that.
    – Simon Moshenko
    Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 18:44

1 Answer 1

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You're not the only one to have encountered this problem. It seems that everyone is having a problem with one of the disks labeled APFS VOLUME VM giving the error you're receiving. The following is not an ideal solution if you're needing to recover data or anything. If you don't care about data recovery, just blow it all away and start over again.

  • Start the MacBook in recovery mode by holding Command+R at reboot.
  • Once booted into recovery mode, go to the terminal (top menu bar, under utilities) and list your drives with the command diskutil apfs list and you should see an output like below.

enter image description here

  • Look for your volume APFS Volume VM and noted the identifier for that APFS Volume.
  • Delete the VM volume by using the command diskutil apfs eraseVolume IDENTIFIER. So for this example output the command would be diskutil apfs eraseVolume disk1s4
  • Once deleted it should create a new volume again, verify this by running diskutil apfs list
  • Reboot and try the install again
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  • Wow! That worked! How?
    – Simon Moshenko
    Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 20:17
  • Also I have a few suggestions for your answer: 1. diskutil apfs list seems to have a different output format than you have on your screenshot 2. diskutil apfs eraseVolume seems to require --name parameter. For which I used "VM"
    – Simon Moshenko
    Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 20:19
  • Why formatting the whole drive(which I did before) in my case did nothing? How is this different?
    – Simon Moshenko
    Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 20:20

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