MacOS 2015 BigSur isn’t starting up properly

[DougieCooper95]

Hello, I made this post long ago Is my 2015 MacOS dying or what? where my Mac was playing up. Eventually I got into safe mode, upgraded to BigSur and my problems were mostly gone.

Fast forward to now and I’m having issues again. It froze today and I shut it down and turned it back on. After loading for eternity, it restarted on its own and gave the message “Your Mac restarted because of a problem.”

And now my Mac won’t start up properly. Logo comes up, then the bar gets a quarter of the way through and nothing.

I have no idea how to do safe mode (shift button does nothing). I had to shut down 10+ times trying to figure it out and went into recovery mode instead and tried using first aid.

At the moment, it’s going through the process slowly but I’m seeing these weird errors “nchildren does not match drec count” and warnings “found orphan dstream Id object”, every time it checks the snapshot. I have no idea what any of this means. What does it mean exactly? I’ve been looking it up but I’m honestly not understanding a lot of it.

I’m worried this isn’t going to solve my issue at all and I won’t be able to start up my drive. Is it worth getting an external hard drive and backing up? Is that even possible in recovery mode? Is it worth getting a new Mac? This one is just causing me nothing but problems and I need it for a lot of my work!

 

[MacInWin]

Sounds like the hard drive failed. Backing up now is probably too late. Backups need to be done while the drive is working. Sorry to be the bearer of that bad news.

 

[DougieCooper95]

Sounds like the hard drive failed. Backing up now is probably too late. Backups need to be done while the drive is working. Sorry to be the bearer of that bad news.

I really hope that isn’t the case. When I ran first aid, it still showed the amount of data that’s on the drive.

 

[lclev]

Well backing up prior to your current issues would have been good. If you are now thinking an external for backup is good - it is. I would try to get as much backed up as possible right away. Any chance you have a Time Machine backup? Anything would be good because the drive is dying. Sorry....

Lisa

 

[TotalSolutions]

You had six years to buy a cheap external drive for TM. And now you decide you time is valuable. Why don’t you renew every three years or so and put it on business expenses.
Failed drive don’t start. Could be something else, hopefully.

 

[TotalSolutions]

Try to save your data, without deleting any. (What are you doing). Take your new external drive and load on a bootable Mac iOS. Get the 2015 Mac to boot off the external drive. Copy data to new drive. Reinstall Big Sur to 2015 Mac. Copy data back across. Reformat new drive and use as TM use only.