upgraded to catalina. nothing works. want to go back to an old back up. cannot because file system changed with catalina. stuck with a useless Mac.

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upgraded to catalina. nothing works. want to go back to an old back up. cannot because file system changed with catalina. stuck with a useless Mac.

How do you go back from Catalina? Everything got messed up. I want to use my Time Machine backup, but I cannot, because the file system changed. Now I am stuck in 'nothing works land'.

Would have been nice to have a warning about the upgrade:

Your Time Machine Backups will be useless.

75% of your hard drive will be stuffed into a "Safety" folder, and you cannot place those contents back where they were.

All of your Alias' will not work. Many of your programs will not work.

Etc., etc., etc.

Been a Mac user since my Macintosh II in 1988 or 89. NEVER have I felt so betrayed.

iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 31, 2019 10:19 PM

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Answer 1

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RoyalFlushAK(s)

Level 1

18 points

Oct 31, 2019 10:41 PM in response to rdgchino

You have to erase the HD

Reformat it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Make sure you create a single partition

Now do a Recovery of the previous OS or if you have the Mojave file do a fresh installation and when the system ask you if you want to transfer from Time Machine do that. It will take some time to be back to your previous OS but it can be done.

In couple months I'm sure Catalina will run like a champ and we all will run back to the newest OS. Always has been like that.

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Answer 2

rdgchino Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 4, 2019 11:03 AM in response to rdgchino

Your answer was helpful, and pointed me in the right direction. However it did become much more complicated quickly. The internal Macintosh HD Fusion disk, could not be formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, as that was not available in the dropdown menu under Disk Utilities in Recovery mode. Thus, I had to purchase a second external drive, use Recovery to transfer the Time Machine backup to the new external drive. Then I used the the second external drive as a boot/startup drive to start the computer. It then got worse, as the internal Fusion drive now displayed as two distinct drives: Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data. Formatting them independently became futile, and would have created a myriad of problems (plus lose the benefits of the "fusion drive". I found a support article (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207584).

After re-fusing the Fusion drive, Migration Assistant was used to finally move everything back to the original configuration. Only minor glitches have occurred since returning to the former system. No Catalina for me!

Thanks for your assistance.

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upgraded to catalina. nothing works. want to go back to an old back up. cannot because file system changed with catalina. stuck with a useless Mac.

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