Julian Williams

Starting Over (on my MacBook)

Well inevitably, Apple let me down. A standard Sequoia 15.3.1 update basically bricked my installation of MacOS and created a boot loop at login. After about 8 hours of my own troubleshooting to no avail (repairing the OS install, and putting it into DFU - Device Firmware Upgrade - mode) and then a trip to the Apple Store, it appeared that nothing could be done except to wipe the installation and start again.

Luckily my backups were fairly solid, lots of iCloud backups including photos, so I wasn't too worried about most of my data, although I did do a last minute share disk (formerly target disk mode) and copy across some recent files not backed up (read: stored in the downloads folder :S).

So the silver lining is that this is a great time for me to start my MacOS install from scratch and only install the necessities after a few years of software installs and data hoarding. Here's a running list of what I installed, in order:

... more to come!