Upgrading to Sierra
Oct. 27th, 2016 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylAnother OS upgrade, this time to macOS Sierra, made far more difficult than it should have been by on-going disk problems on my iMac. After downloading Sierra, the initial upgrade failed because the existing root volume failed to verify — something which also prevented me from booting back into El Capitan.
Having backed up the contents of my home directory — which I'd deliberately kept fairly small, given the untrustworthness of the internal disk — I reformatted the root volume, forgetting, until after I'd started the process, that I'd failed to copy the Sierra image to external storage before starting the process. I resolved the problem by booting into recovery mode, reinstalling El Capitan, rebooting, downloading Sierra again, and installing over the image of El Cap.
Eventually, with the system back up and running, I restored my home directory, applied the latest updates for Sierra and rebooted the machine. Fortunately, everything started up again without any errors and everything now seems to be back to normal.
I've been meaning to replace my iMac for a while — I've had it for over six years, so it's certainly put in its time and the internal disk seems to be increasingly past its prime — but Apple haven't released any compelling updates since last year, when the upper end of the iMac was refreshed to Skylake. My cunning plan — somewhat hampered by the spectacular devaluation of stirling! — is to keep my current system bumping along until the iMac release, when presumably the systems will move to Kaby Lake, before upgrading.
Having backed up the contents of my home directory — which I'd deliberately kept fairly small, given the untrustworthness of the internal disk — I reformatted the root volume, forgetting, until after I'd started the process, that I'd failed to copy the Sierra image to external storage before starting the process. I resolved the problem by booting into recovery mode, reinstalling El Capitan, rebooting, downloading Sierra again, and installing over the image of El Cap.
Eventually, with the system back up and running, I restored my home directory, applied the latest updates for Sierra and rebooted the machine. Fortunately, everything started up again without any errors and everything now seems to be back to normal.
I've been meaning to replace my iMac for a while — I've had it for over six years, so it's certainly put in its time and the internal disk seems to be increasingly past its prime — but Apple haven't released any compelling updates since last year, when the upper end of the iMac was refreshed to Skylake. My cunning plan — somewhat hampered by the spectacular devaluation of stirling! — is to keep my current system bumping along until the iMac release, when presumably the systems will move to Kaby Lake, before upgrading.
