macOS Infinite Boot Loop Recovery | No Backup | No Data Loss

I have been to the reboot loop of death on my Intel iMac and back to tell the tale with all of my data and zero recovery loss last night I had a very scary situation when it comes to my technology during a reboot from boot camp Windows back to Mac OS my iMac entered into an infinite boot loop I would hear the old school Mac chime the Apple logo would appear flash a couple times spend about three to five minutes loading with a loading bar and then it would just restart and do the process all over again now I was partly to blame for this situation you see it was late at night and I was doing some late night gaming over on Windows but as I primarily use Mac I decided to reboot over to Mac to get it ready for the next day during the reboot however while still in Windows I was prompted with an Apple software update now this doesn't happen very often on the Windows side of things so I assume it was just a boot camp update it said in order to boot back to Mac it needed to update 8 and I'll be honest with you it was late at night I have a stable ethernet connection and I've never really had any problems with this computer so I didn't even read it I just went for it I assume it was an update for boot camp because it's rare to have apple updates on the Windows side of things but to this day I still don't even know what update I actually agreed to I don't think it was malicious but yeah it certainly set my computer into a tailspin so what did I do well as I said it was late at night so I fiddled around with the computer trying to restart it for about 20 minutes and then I decided that I would be better off solving this problem after a good night's sleep so I shut it down completely and I went to bed of course it was one of the first things that I thought of the next morning and after attending to a few things around the house I went back up to the office and I was hopeful that maybe my computer had just been cranky the night before and it would boot right up normally well it didn't right back into the infinite boot loop so at this point I knew that I was potentially in for a long stressful recovery and or Salvage operation but there were a few things that I needed to check first to see how dire of a situation that I was actually in and it's here where I want to step back a minute and explain how the rest of this video is going to work I'm going to show you what I did on my system but some of the resets that I do might be different depending on your version of Mac so I'm going to link to all of the Apple support pages for all of the resets that I do so that you can go there to find out the exact right way to do it for your computer also I'm not saying that this will work for every infinite reboot loop situation mine might be very unique but you will get to see the troubleshooting steps that I went through and they should be useful in any Mac OS Kernel Panic Dyer type situation not just infinite reboot Loops but for now back to the story time to find out how bad my situation really was my first step to do all all of the simple SMC and pram resets that I always have to look up the exact keystroke combinations for these have worked in past situations like this especially when actually booting from Mac to Windows so I thought there was a good chance that this would work so here's what I did first of all and this goes for a lot of these situations I unplugged everything from the back of my computer except for my keyboard and my mouse I unplugged all my peripherals so I have my preamp for my audio I have a power injected USB hub all of that stuff got taken out okay and I just tried to restart it like that and of course same thing happened so then I did a pram reset which resets some memory that your computer stores about starting up and just real core system things and there's different ways to do it but on my computer what I wanted to do is I shut it all the way down and then I pressed the power button which on my Intel iMac is back here to the left and then when I saw the Apple logo I pressed command option in PR are at the same time and I wait for the Apple logo to disappear and then come up again your computer is essentially going to restart and once it does that you've reset the pram so then I tried to load it up and same thing infinite reboot loop so it's time to go to an SMC reset now there's a lot of different ways to do SMC resets and I just kind of tried kind of all of them so one thing that I did that used to work on older iMacs is I actually unplugged the power from my computer and then I pressed the power button to try and turn it on and this just drains any extra juice from your system just completely emptying it of power in case anything's going on you know in that regard and that can kind of reset your SMC a shutdown on like an M1 Mac should reset the SMC there isn't even an SMC reset the default way to do it on the Intel iMac is to have the computer shut down and then press and hold the power button for 10 seconds you don't necessarily have to unplug it that should reset the SMC on a laptop you're going to press and hold with your computer shut down you're going to press and hold shift control option in the power power button and you're going to hold that for 10 seconds and that should reset your SMC so I did that and I tried it different ways on my computer just to make sure I was covering all the bases but that didn't work infinite reboot loop so then my next step was to try and boot to safe mode which you can do by having your computer shut down and then you're going to turn it on and when you see the Apple logo you're going to press and hold the shift key until you get to like a login screen okay but that didn't work either so that was not great now in my next step since I was on Windows when this happened it was time to see if Windows was still working and if I could discover anything inside of Windows that might help my situation so because I have bootcamp installed on my computer I shut my computer down I turned it on and I just held the option key and when you do that your bootable drives will come up as you can see and I saw that both my Mac and windows drives were available so this was a really good sign Mac wasn't working so I tried windows and it was up in a Flash super Snappy Speedy working like normal so that was a good sign so what I did in Windows is I went to look for any Apple software updates again right since that's kind of how it started there was nothing there I went into which I got to just by pressing the Windows key and searching for Apple software updates and that should be an application you can open I went to my system tray and I right clicked on bootcamp went into the bootcamp control panel to see if there were any updates for boot camp and there weren't and then I went and I ran my Windows system updates and to my surprise even though I had updated it the day before there was a.net framework update and also I believe a small security update so I was like okay and I ran them and then I decided to restart Windows a few times for good measure so just shutting restarting Windows back to Windows worked fine and then I said okay let's try Mac again so I shut it down and Boot It to Mac and of course it was still in the infinite reboot loop so at this point I tried restarting my computer a number of different ways I tried restarting from Windows to Mac I tried holding the option key to see my bootable drives in booting to Mac I also tried holding the option key to see the bootable Drive and you can actually connect to a Wi-Fi network from that screen so I connected to my Wi-Fi thinking hey maybe there was an Apple software update and it needed to download something and you know if I connect the Wi-Fi maybe that will finish it off did not work so at one point I also let this reboot loop run for a couple of hours and I thought that this was a really good idea because a lot of times when Mac is doing system updates like operating system updates it does restart multiple times and people can kind of get frustrated and impatient and you if you hard reset your computer in the middle of that you can actually corrupt some system files and thinking back I don't even know that night where I did that Apple software update it was restarting maybe I did that maybe I got impatient and gave it a hard reset and this is what sent me in this tailspin that's just my best hunch right now but either way after letting it try and load for a couple of hours it was still in the same infinite boot loop so it was time to take it to the next level and try some more invasive measures my next step was to boot into recovery mode and run Disk Utility to see if there were any errors on my disks and maybe if they could be repaired I hadn't even tried entering recovery mode yet so I wasn't even sure if it would work so I shut my computer down and then under restart I held command in R and thankfully I just held that you keep holding it and thankfully all of a sudden I was presented with the select a language screen so I chose my language and then I was presented with four options in recovery mode restore from time machine reinstall Mac OS use Safari to go on the Internet or use Disk Utility so I went right into Disk Utility to see how things were in Disk Utility all of my computer hard drives were listed correctly this was a very good sign so I clicked on all of my Mac drives and I ran the diagnose and repair option in Disk Utility into my surprise none of the drives had any errors and Disk Utility said they were all good to go and working fine okay overall this was a good sign but because Disk Utility didn't repair anything I wasn't very confident that my computer would be up properly but I had to give it a try so I exited Disk Utility and I rebooted my computer did it start up nope same thing now I want to mention real quick if I couldn't get my iMac to boot into recovery mode what I would have done is I would have used my MacBook Pro and I would have connected them in my case USB to my MacBook Pro USBC to my iMac I would have shut down the iMac and I would have restarted it holding the T key which would put the iMac into Target disk mode meaning I can then look at the disk on my MacBook Pro so I don't have to do anything in terms of shutting down the MacBook Pro once this is in Target disk mode and they were connected by USB then I would be able to go into Disk Utility on the MacBook Pro and I would see my iMac disk if it's available if it's showing up and then I would be able to repair and diagnose from there but since recovery mode was working and this is actually a newer version of Mac OS than I have on my MacBook Pro I didn't really try digging any deeper into solving the problem with Target disk mode because the recovery mode was working but that's definitely a great option when you're trying to do some hardcore Mac OS repair okay Disk Utility didn't work so now what well I I guess it's here where I should mention that I'm a bit of a wild Mac User especially at the level that I operate on with computers I try to keep most of my important stuff in the cloud and I like to completely wipe my computer pretty often so I don't really do too many backups and in this situation I had quite a few files not backed up it wouldn't be the end of the world if I lost them it would set me back and it would certainly be a pain in the butt so although wiping my computer clean was an option and that's where I would get to if I got to that point I wasn't ready for that yet now luckily for me Mac OS is absolutely amazing and does a great job of separating system files from user files so in recovery mode there's this option to reinstall Mac OS and although that seems scary and potentially dangerous if it goes correctly it will install the OS completely but it will keep all of the user files meaning everything would be there afterwards now if this failed I knew that my next step would most likely be to wipe the computer clean but it was one last sliver of Hope and I wasn't ready to give up yet so I went for it a complete reinstall of Mac OS it started and at first it said it would take over two and a half hours but then it quickly jumped to under 50 minutes and so there I was desperately looking at my Airline computer holding on to my last chance of data recovery my last chance to having a normal work week my last chance to not staying up all night reconfiguring a new install of Mac OS and my last chance to turn this Dreadful situation into a learning and teaching opportunity where I emerge as the hero Against All Odds well my friends that is exactly what I did my screen went blank it was restarting did it finish already that was too quick then another loading screen it didn't say installing Mac OS but it did say less than 30 minutes okay better than nothing then another blank screen and then nothing it wasn't restarting it shut itself down I got pretty worried at this moment but whatever I did a manual turn on and then the same loading screen from before but it was moving this was different close to the end but then again blank screen no but it started restarting again the bar was moving fast and then I was in my login screen my computer was back and all of my files were there okay what now backup yes of course I should have done a backup but I'm a rebel I didn't need it I was in it for all or nothing I checked software updates into my surprise there was a small security update I ran it it finished okay now what backup right nah I went for it restarted it come on yes and it came up very quickly too so there you have it everyone I have been to the reboot loop of death on my Intel iMac and back to tell the tale with all of my data and zero recovery loss it was scary it was a journey but in the end it was thrilling and yes I may be a gigantic nerd but when I wrote this script I was typing as fast as my fingers would go and my heart was beating with excitement at how I was able to recover my system and prove that these Intel iMacs are as robust as they come like I said if you're interested to hear more about why I love the Intel iMac so much stay tuned because that video is coming up next I hope you enjoyed and learned from my story if you did I would really appreciate a thumbs up here on YouTube and if you want to see more content like this don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel that's all I have for you for today this is Anson from ansonalex.com

Channel: Anson Alexander

Views: 12,392

Keywords: Apple, Boot Loop, Data Loss, Infinite Boot Loop, Mac, Recovery, Recovery Mode, Troubleshooting, Ventura, macOS

Id: 0kcoH7vDW5k

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023