El Capitan Beta 2 upgrade fails

Can you boot into Safe Mode or Recovery HD?

Safe mode ends in the same situation.

Starting with Alt shows the Recovery disk. Selecting it ends in the same situation, hang!

Beta 1 did not have any problems, was installed on empty disk.

Two others have had similar issues after installing Beta 2. I went though it with them in the following threads:

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/7080

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/7014

Did you mean to mark your question as resolved?

No !

I think you can "Unmark as correct"

I just did. I will follow the links you provided. Just now I am not on the system. Will go through later today.

Thank you very much for the tips. I will update with either outcome.

Sure. If you have any trouble later, I'll try to help.

As you'll see from the threads the problem seems to be that the final part of the update needs to access your iCloud account, the local files associated with which, beta 1 corrupted for quite a few. The solutions revolve around deleting those files my whatever means. Since you can't access the Recovery HD it'll have to be one of the following:

If you have another mac, you can put your MP into Target Mode (Cmd+T held at boot) then delete them from there:

<EL CAPITAN PARTITION ON MP>/Users/<YOUR HOME FOLDER>/Library/Application Support/iCloud/Accounts

Then rebooting the MP.

Failing that, there's always Single User Mode:

• Hold ⌘S on startup
• Wait until the white text is completely finished scrolling down then type:
• mount -uw /
• cd /Users
• ls
• --- IDENTIFY YOUR USER FOLDER FOR THE NEXT LINE - TYPE IT AFTER cd WITHOUT MIXING UPPER AND LOWER CASE LETTERS ---
• cd YOURUSERFOLDERHERE
• rm -r Library/Application\ Support/iCloud/Accounts
• reboot

Thank you.

I will update you when I am home and on the system. Below is only a brief observation.

You assumption is that during the update the Lontents of ~/Library/Application Support/iCloud/Accounts are corrupted.

After 10.11 Beta 1 was installed and user created, all initial steps done and logged in into the account, Beta 1 was running fine.

Before firing up the upgrade to Beta 2 , I removed "rm -rf Accounts".

After the upgrade the known situation with the hang. I can boot from another drive after powering down. but did not look what happened to the iCloud accounts. You think there are corrupted entries.

-Horen

If you can check, and there aren't, then there goes that theory - if they're there then it's definitely worth a shot to delete them and see.

The command you used would have also removed the Accounts folder itself - probably not significant because it should be automatically recreated once OS X writes to it again - but, to the best of my knowledge, people who successfully used the workaround in various contexts deleted the files in the folder and not the folder itself.

I will follow up and see if it solves the problem and update you. It will be later today.

-Horen

One additional note.

In the running Beta 1, sshd ( remote login ) was enabled. When the system was hanging with the dark screen, it was possible to ping the box, but not ssh. I looks like it is hanging somewhere between single user and multiuser, before init level 2 otherwise sshd would be there.

-Horen

Well, one of the common symptoms in the two threads I linked you to was the hang with the progress bar at 3/4, so the kernal was loaded, the file-system checked out; my reading was that it got stuck waiting for one of the system services to finish initiating. Sounds like yours may not be making it that far.

If it turns out to be unrelated to iCloud account (as is sounding increasingly likely), I'd suggest you do a NVRAM and SMC reset (if you haven't already) and boot with Verbose Mode (cmd+v). That should provide a clue. Once things get to that stage though, it's almost always quicker to rescue whatever is important via Target Mode, erase, and start again.

There must be something different. The system comes up in single user mode.

The monitor is a Dell 5K with double display connections. But it is certainly not related to the display. Beta 1 was completely fine, perfect 5K resolution.

There must be something else going on directly related to the MacPro Hardware.

I will stay with Beta 1, it all is working fine. Hope the next updtae will be a combo update which includes beta 2 and 3. I opened a bug report with Apple, but you know where it goes.

Thanks for trying to help.

-Horen

Unlikely to be a combo till the first 10.11.2 beta.

There might be other full installers for el capitan developer previews.

Yosemite got full installers for DP1, DP5, DP7 and GM.

The first combo for yosemite was for the first 10.10.2 beta.