I wonder if any of you have a solution for this?

[johnnyv]

Hey all,

OK. We run a late model "cheese grater" Mac Pro tower. The Mac OS system resides on an SSD drive, which is partitioned into two partitions.

One partition runs ProTools 10 on Mac OS Mavericks, while the second partition runs ProTools 2018.x on Mac OS Sierra.

Recently, we had a client come to use the studio; he brought a hard drive and booted our computer from that. So far, so good.

When he left, our computer booted into the Mavericks/PT10 partition, which we seldom use. But when we go to System Preferences > Startup Disk so that we can go back to our PT12 partition, our Sierra/PT12 partition does not appear in the Startup Disk choices. That partition (and its contents) DOES appear on the desktop, but it does not show up in the Startup Disk choices, so we can't get back to using our Sierra/PT12 partition, which is what we use every day.

We have tried nearly everything we can think of (other than erasing hard drives and starting all over).

Has anyone run into this? Does anyone have any suggestions? I think this has something to do with Apple changing file formats and/or how it handles working with SSD's, such that an older Mac OS (such as Mavericks) doesn't allow choosing a partition of the SSD which uses a new-file-format OS such as Sierra.

Can anyone help???

John

[Darryl Ramm]

Have you smacked the customer yet? Then smacked yourself for letting them do this? You do have a bootable clone backup right?

You've "tried everything"... How about telling us exactly what you've tired so people don't waste their time resuggesting what you've already done...

Have you worked though this page?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202796
Especially does Option+Boot work or not?

If you can see the other file system when Mavericks is booted then it's not caused by APFS filesystem changes (it's the whole filesystem format that changed not a file format). And computer is right in front of you... so what exact filesystems are on each partition? (Command-I on the disk partition icons and it displays filesystems amongst all the other info, or use the disk utility).

[Sardi]

APFS was introduced with High Sierra, so your drive won’t be running that.

If booting whilst holding the Option key doesn’t show both drives, try a repair disk with Disk Utility and see if that allows you to boot.

Personally, I’d buy a copy of Disk Warrior and run it on that partition. I’ve had something like this happened in the past and DW allowed it to boot again.


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[johnnyv]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Sorry; in my haste I forgot to mention what we've tried.

Yes, normally such a situation would be solved by holding Option upon startup. However, for whatever reason, the Mavericks partition is not recognizing the Sierra partition as a startup drive; thus, holding down Option on startup just boots up the Mavericks drive.

Yes, the first thing I thought was to run Disk Utility on the Sierra drive. Choosing either "Verify" or "Repair" shows the Sierra drive to be fine; verified and not in need of repair.

Yes, we own Disk Warrior but the computer never boots at all when we try booting from the Disk Warrior thumb drive.

As far as our having a bootable clone backup, well yes and no. We have two studios in our place, running essentially the exact same rigs. However, I am deathly afraid of popping the Studio B drive (set up exactly as our now-problematic Studio A drive) into the Studio A computer for fear that somehow doing so will take down THAT drive, as well. Moreover, in a funny way, I don't think that would solve the problem because having the client boot from his external Sierra OS is not far off from what we would be doing if we were to insert a bootable clone of our own Sierra OS partition.

In the past, I believe we solved a similar situation by going into Terminal mode on the computer and typing in something that worked. But trying to do this again, the computer is telling us it's not seeing the Sierra partition.

Totally weird and quite a challenge!

[Rich Breen]

Originally Posted by johnnyv

...
Yes, we own Disk Warrior but the computer never boots at all when we try booting from the Disk Warrior thumb drive. ...

Just run Disk Warrior from the Mavericks partition - you don't need to boot into it.

Also, see #5 in this post: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/what-makes-volume-bootable

Let us know what works.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by johnnyv

... As far as our having a bootable clone backup, well yes and no...

I hope you get your issue sorted out soon.

Moving forward, you might want to implement a solid boot drive backup plan. I use an external drive to store boot drive images of all my computers. I also keep notes on what changes were made between each boot backup. I create a new full (not incremental) boot drive backup image every time I make an important change to hardware or software ... so that I can sleep at night. https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/m...tware-3641849/

[Sardi]

As mentioned, you don’t need to run DW from the bootable USB drive. As long as it’s not in the partition you’re trying to repair, it’s fine. It just needs to be able to unmount the partition when working on it which it obviously can’t do if the app resides on it.

Also, rather than take the drive out of the Studio B machine, just clone it to an external and then you can clone that to the Studio A drive that isn’t mounting.

TBH, now that you’ve added further info, I’m suspecting it’s not the drive or partition but something else. The Terminal command you mentioned is jogging my memory of something I came across in the past.

Hmmmm...

**** EDIT

Have you tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM? Try that and see what happens. If that doesn’t work, do a SMC reset.

From memory, I think one of those stores boot info.


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[johnnyv]

Hey all,

Thanks to EVERYONE for the excellent suggestions.

Here's how we got the computer back online.

I took a brand new external hard drive and downloaded a brand new High Sierra system onto it.

Then, I installed that drive into our Mac Pro Tower, while at the same time, I removed the SSD containing our PT10 and PT12 System partitions.

I booted up the Mac Pro tower from the new High Sierra system drive. So far, so good.

I shut down the Mac Pro, and while leaving the High Sierra drive installed, I re-inserted the SSD with our PT System partitions.

Once the computer booted (onto High Sierra), I could see our PT10 and PT12 System partitions in the "Startup Disk" window within System Preferences.

I could then choose our PT12 System partition, rebooted the computer and all is well again.

Probably the best part of this is that I now have a fresh High Sierra drive, and before removing it from the Mac Pro, I installed PTHD 2018.7 onto it, so that we could at least quickly launch a PT session if one of our System drives crashed. It will be nice to have that as a quick backup, although the truth is (knock on wood), we haven't had a System drive failure or even glitch for years, as we keep on top of our drives' health continually. We may ultimately decide to erase our PTHD10 System partition, since at this time, we are comfortable with not needed a PT10 partition going forward.

Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions.

PS. Sardi, I believe you are right. This was not a hard drive or partition problem. It was a "terminal" problem (we had this scenario once before and used Terminal commands to get back online, but for whatever reason, this time the Terminal commands weren't solving the issue). Our sister computer has never had this issue once (switching between a PT10 partition and a PT12 partition), and I think there is something in this particular computer's firmware that caused this little glitch.

[Darryl Ramm]

Great. Now is time to make Carbon Copy Clone backups of all your boot volumes on all your systems

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

time to make Carbon Copy Clone backups

+1