Mac absolutely destroyed after recent update

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Level 1

8 points

Mac absolutely destroyed after recent update

The other day (I think Friday 15th May) , a Mac-mini required a restart to finish installing updates (I have no idea what updates these were). Well since this, it is now completely unusable!

Booting up takes about x10 times longer than normal, when it does boot up to desktop, you can't even click on/launch anything at all for a good 2-3 minutes.

Trying to just open anything and then once opened, use it is just taking forever. Every action is painfully slow. With it sat completely idle, being asked of nothing, it is just absolutely useless now...

This has started happening since I installed the update (like I usually would). I have no idea what the updates were and can't even check what Os and version it's running now.

Any ideas on what I can do?

Mac mini, macOS 10.14

Posted on May 19, 2020 2:57 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

16,655 points

May 19, 2020 3:28 AM in response to zigojacko

You didn't tell what mini you have but my troubleshooting voodoo is:

backup while you still can

shutdown and disconnect the power for 20 sec or press power 10 sec to reset SMC (YMMV may vary)

command-option-p-r boot to reset PRAM

shift boot to safe mode

option-r boot to recovery mode and check Disk First Aid

reboot normally

Sometimes updates may stress the old HDs that they decide to break just then and need replacing.

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Answer 2

zigojacko Author

Level 1

8 points

May 19, 2020 7:36 AM in response to Matti Haveri

Thanks for this advice.

I've tried to apply your instructions the best I can and it is gradually seeming to get better now (at least, back to it's usual poor performance haha).

I've no idea what part of what I have done helped matters out but it has taken me on and off about 3 hours for it to start allowing me to use it a little.

Cheers

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Answer 3

May 19, 2020 11:43 AM in response to zigojacko

We have an old 2009 MacBook in our household in light use and sometimes it takes some patience and a cup of coffee while it does its stuff.

I recently installed a SSD to Mac mini late 2009 and that speeded it up clearly and now it is somewhat faster (I gave it to a relative for light use to replace a 2010 Windows laptop that was unbearably slow in Windows 7 and 10 and even in Linux -- Puppy Linux was aOK but eventually I removed its (quite slow) HD and use it as an external test partition for Catalina on my Mac mini 2018).

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Answer 4

GizmoD-G

Level 1

4 points

Jun 4, 2020 8:34 AM in response to Matti Haveri

Hi, I had a similar problem with my Mac mini (late 2012). It has 16GB RAM upgrade and a new fast SSD (I also have a Windows 10 partition on it - dual booting) yet I eventually had to revert to a Time Machine backup and switch off automatic updates.

I went through the steps you describe and found that my Mac partition wasn't demounting and was reporting various errors. EVENTUALLY (3 attempts later) I seemed to have a stable bootable partition and inserted the backup.

The latest update (10.15.5) won't be going on my Mac until I see a lot more evidence that it's stable.

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Mac absolutely destroyed after recent update

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