OSX 10.11.2 beta 2 Failed To Install

Managed to get 10.11.1 installed on the external drive I tried before. Ran Disk Utilty and apparently there was a boot record problem it fixed. Then had to reinstall to the external. The internal Fusion drive is still non-functioning. Looks like a call to Apple Support later.

Hi dialabrian,

Were Apple Support able to help? If not, I've got a couple of ideas for things you could try.

Best wishes,

Max.

Hi Max, long time no see. 🙂

I haven't talked to them yet. I don't think they are there until 7am my time which is in three hours my time. I looked at the drive and the structure seems okay but I think it may be locked.

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD 2.0 TB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk1

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD 121.0 GB disk1s2

3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk1s3

the disks verify okay as well.

Always welcome any ideas you have.

Wow! You're a very early bird 🙂

Fusion drives can be tricky in my experience. I'm assuming that you can now boot into the OS X install on the external drive and can see the internal fusion drive from there. You can get a bearing on what's happening with the output of:

diskutil cs list

That will give you the lvgUUID of the fusion drive and will also indicate if it is locked.

If it is indeed locked, then you could try:

diskutil cs unlockLV lvUUID

That may be enough for you to return access to the drive for restarting / reinstalling.

Failing that, of if it isn't locked, I'd next try dissolving the fusion drive and recreating it.

To dissolve it:

diskutil cs deletelvgUUID

To recreate it, you'll first need to run:

diskutil list

Make a note of the mount points of the drives that are to be the constituents of the fusion drive. For example, if the name you want for the drive were "FUSION DRIVE" and the mount points were SSD = /dev/disk1, HDD = /dev/disk2, the command would be:

diskutil cs create FUSION\ DRIVE /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2

If that completes successfully, an ID will be displayed as "Core Storage LVG UUID.", which will be needed for the final command needed in the fusion drive creation process to create the logical volume:

diskutil cs createVolume lvgUUID jhfs+ Macintosh\ HD 100%

Let me know how you get on or if any of the above needs further clarification.

Actually I can't see the drive other than from the terminal. If I try and run the 10.11.1 installer it doesn't recognize the disk. Disk Utility can't do anything with it, etc. Think it's safe to run your commands? 😐

CoreStorage logical volume groups (1 found)

|

+-- Logical Volume Group 1C6DAC32-ACA2-4DC6-B706-4ABEDECA2C95

=========================================================

Name: Macintosh HD

Status: Online

Size: 2120528027648 B (2.1 TB)

Free Space: 2114672771072 B (2.1 TB)

|

+-< Physical Volume 6EC80417-497E-4B57-B346-A0F85DBE567E

| ----------------------------------------------------

| Index: 0

| Disk: disk1s2

| Status: Online

| Size: 120988852224 B (121.0 GB)

|

+-< Physical Volume 2283E178-9B8F-44BA-A6BC-2448E748D990

----------------------------------------------------

Index: 1

Disk: disk0s2

Status: Online

Size: 1999539175424 B (2.0 TB)

An attempt to unlock is perfectly safe - it either will or it wont - but the fusion drive will be no worse off as a result:

• diskutil cs unlockLV 6EC80417-497E-4B57-B346-A0F85DBE567E
• diskutil cs unlockLV 2283E178-9B8F-44BA-A6BC-2448E748D990

diskutil cs unlockLV 1C6DAC32-ACA2-4DC6-B706-4ABEDECA2C95

1C6DAC32-ACA2-4DC6-B706-4ABEDECA2C95 is not a CoreStorage Logical Volume UUID

bad iMac 😁

The LVG is needed for the dissolution, the LVs are what's required for the unlock attempts.

I tried all identifiers. Same message.

I rather suspected that the unlockLV verb only applied to encrypted CoreStorage volumes and that would seem to confirm it - I wanted to give it a shot since you had come to suspect it was locked.

If you're happy to dissolve and recreate your Fusion drive then I'm pretty sure that will be more successful. It will, however, erase it of course:

diskutil cs delete 1C6DAC32-ACA2-4DC6-B706-4ABEDECA2C95

I have a feeling that may be the only solution. I was trying to avoid three+ hours of Migration Assistant or Restore from Time Machine. I think I will wait until Apple gets out of bed and see if they have any other ideas. If not I'll just recreate the darn thing,

I have to say, I had no troubles with the 10.11 and 10,11.1 developer previews on my other iMac and even the first 10.11.2 preview on this iMac. Oh well. 😁

I'll let you know how it all comes out.

ciao for now.

Best of luck.

Thanks, and thanks for trying to help. I put in a good word for you with Apple support last week. 😀

Max, 🙂

After spending a little time with a senior advisor essentially "forcing" him to find a solution, he found some info that basically said, if the SSD doesn't show beneath the Fusion drive in DiskUtility, run the command you gave me…

"diskutil cs createVolume lvgUUID jhfs+ Macintosh\ HD 100%"

As soon as I ran it my internal drive showed up in the sidebar of the Finder and I could run the 10.11.1 installer. Unfortunately I still had to migrate everything from a backup.

Something odd though, the Tech tried to email me the command (twice) but it came looking like this…

"diskutil cs createVolume jhfs Macintosh\ HD 100&#37;" lucky for me I knew it was the command you posted.

.

The other thing is, while I was doing all this my 2015 MacBook updated itself to the second 10.11.2 beta without incident. I think some of the seeds aren't including Skylake support.

Thanks again. 🙂

Good to know how it panned out for you. Glad to hear you got it sorted, albeit requiring a migrate.

I've read in various forums about the patchy Skylake support, hopefully they'll have it ironed out soon and you can enjoy your cutting edge Mac tech without incident.

It's not unusual for "special characters" such as % to get mis-interpreted when strings go from one encoding scheme to another - perhaps their outbound emails go through a filter or something.

'Till the next time 🙂