Well, I’ve never actually had this problem before, but my MacBook Pro 2016 has been freezing and in trying to get it work and sadly this looks like it might be a RAM problem in the machine as I am getting a hash mismatch error. I tried a reinstall and I’m hoping this works, but we will see.
The symptom is the machine hangs with a literal freeze. I’ve not seen this before. I first tried a reinstallation without erasing data by holding ⌘-R and then try to reinstall but it failed with I can’t complete.
So then I tried the more serious reinstall and wiped the disk. I did discover an obvious thing which is that the base Monterey for 2016 does not have WPA3 support, so you need a WiFi network with WPA2 (fortunately I have two). But the Shift-Option-Command-R (⇪-⌥-⌘-R) did seem to work and we will see if it reoccurs.
Reinstall does not work try Factory Reset when using Open Core Legacy Patcher
It appears that this does not erase the hard drive, so even after the rebuild, I’m still getting these errors so off I go to figure out how just to erase the entire drive and do a full factory reset. It turns out this is different for different machines, for late model systems, there is an Erase Disk Utility that handles this.
I’m pretty sure the issue is the legacy patcher and the way it put things into the system, but I’m not sure.
If you have a MacBook 2018 or earlier (that is you don’t have the T2 security chip or Apple Silicon), then you need to with increasing desperation try this things (hap tip to Clean my Mac):
- Restart the system and hold down ⌘-R and then select the Disk Utility and Erage the entire Volume. This will likely be the entire APFS Disk Group. Note that with the 2016 MacBooks, the High Sierra operating system doesn’t know about the new APFS file system was part of High Sierra, but my machine got confused when I tried to erase and install it and when I rebooted, I erased it again and just made a regular HFS+ system.
- Then after it is erased choose Reinstall your MacOS and this should now download it over the WiFi
- But what happens is that the reinstall mysteriously fails with “Could not install please try again” and it says this could be because this installs the latest version of MacOS and it could fail because the recovery partition on the disk is gone. This might have been the wrong date, but then I remember I tried to use Open Core Legacy Patcher so it probably thought I was trying to install the latest version that works…
- I tried Option-Command-R which is the latest version available and this will work but is hard to get right if you don’t hold the three keys down properly, you will get Option-R and it will fail again after a while complaining about installation failure with a macOS Update Assistant is stuck updating.
- Or Shift-Option-Command-R which is the version that came from the factory but I found this was hard to get right and kept failing. There is also a potential issue where the signing of the old operating system is out of date, so Option-Command-R is the best choice.
- Or hold the D key and will put you into diagnostic mode and I ran it without problems
- So now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t try a PRAM reset as I’ve had trouble there before, but it doesn’t seem to do the double dong when you hold Command-Option-P-R down or at least I can’t tell because late 2016 MacBook Pros do not do the double dong sound.
- Finally you can create your own installation USB and try to instal from that there. This is what
Finally while waiting, kick your wired headphones into Atmos
A final note is that I’ve been loving the Sennheiser HD-650 with SoundSource equalization, but I’ve always been confused about how to get the wider sound field that Atmos enables. Turns out that Apple Music detects Apple headphones, but if you want it to work on your wired headphones, then you should turn it on Always in Music > Preferences. And it sounds pretty incredible with classical music in particular.
