New-to-me 2015 rMBP boot issue

[Diana]

This is the machine I got from OWC (thanks OWC!). It came with High Sierra installed on it (no disks). I migrated everything over in the set-up phase, and most everything was working after I finally figured out that serial numbers didn’t copy to the new machine. I *knew* it, but ... yeah. The last thing was to get Duet working. Something happened and now it won’t boot. It won’t even boot in safe mode. Verbose tells me that a particular program is a problem, and the stuff on line I have found says things like “delete the program” and “look here” and stuff that I can do after it boots, but it isn’t booting! The status bar gets to its end under the Apple logo, the fans come on and go rather high, and it just seems to hang. No change for over 5 minutes so I’m not just getting impatient.

Reset NVRAM. No change
Reset SMC. Bar gets 2/3 of the way, and slows way down. Fans rise and ... no change

The last thing I have found is to reinstall the OS. Before I go to that extreme, is there anything else this august forum can advise me to do?

Thanks in advance,

Diana

Ps: I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic mentioning our sponsor. Great machine, spastic operator sitting in front of it

[space-time]

It came with High Sierra installed on it (no disks)

these is now Macs come these days. AFAIK Snow Leopard was the last OS sold separately as a disk. I think 10.7 and maybe 10.8 were available on USB sticks, and after that all was in the cloud.

I could be wrong though.

I am not sure how to help with the boot issues, hopefully some gurus here can advise.

[GGD]

You mentioned trying Safe Mode, but did you try the Recovery Partition. Hold down the CMD and "R" keys at power on, and continue to hold until you see indications that it's booting.

From there you can run Disk Utility and at least see if the file system is intact. Making it that far will also give you some reassurance that the hardware is generally working.

BTW: What OS were you running on the old computer? And would you prefer to stick with that version if the new HW can run it?

[decay]

Reinstall the OS in recovery mode. It won't over-write your applications or user data. It will do an over-the-top OS reinstall. Worth a try!

[Diana]

I was running El Capitan - didn’t really see a need to go higher. The new hardware will run the backup I made of the old system; I had made a recovery partition for that system, just in case. I didn’t see a recovery partition for HS, but the recovery mode (Carl-r) is currently reinstalling HS. Hopefully this works, with no problems.GGD and Decay! The brain is not functioning at 100%, apparently.

About 30 minutes to go.

Diana

[Diana]

Now it’s installing. Calculating the time ... about 34 minutes.

[Diana]

Success! miley-music039:

[decay]

Diana wrote:
Success! miley-music039:

:ftw:

[Diana]

Diana wrote:
I was running El Capitan - didn’t really see a need to go higher. The new hardware will run the backup I made of the old system; I had made a recovery partition for that system, just in case. I didn’t see a recovery partition for HS, but the recovery mode (Carl-r) is currently reinstalling HS. Hopefully this works, with no problems.GGD and Decay! The brain is not functioning at 100%, apparently.

About 30 minutes to go.

Diana

Apparently my fingers weren’t either!