M2 MacBook Air running Sonoma.
Yesterday I opened up my Mac and it booted into Recovery Mode, which I have never seen before. There was no explanation for why this happened. I used the Mac 30 minutes earlier with no issue, and shut it down and stored it normally.
So, I used Disk Utility to run First Aid on the drive (the main partition, not the recovery one), and it reported no errors and no fixes applied.
I had no alternative but to re-install the OS. But it said “The volume cannot be downgraded.” I knew my free space was low (~9 GB), and guessed that was the problem, so I mounted my Data partition and used Terminal to free up some space, deleting 6 or 7 large apps from ~/Applications (technically, /Volumes/Data/Users/Tom/Applications). Then I rebooted into Recovery Mode and was able to re-install Sonoma from the internet. (I.e. the volume now could be “downgraded.”)
Now the Mac will boot to the normal login screen, but after I enter my credentials, the loading bar starts to fill momentarily (up to ~8%), then the screen goes black with the Apple logo and a progress bar stuck at 2%, and it stays there forever. This is where I’m stuck.
I don’t know how to debug or fix this. My theory is that there’s some login item left over from an app I just deleted (I suspect the Battle.net app, which always asks for sudo during install and updates even though it doesn’t need sudo — I always refuse and yet the app and games work fine). But I can’t manage my login items without logging in, and the Mac won’t complete the login process. I can’t un-delete the apps because rm -rf bypasses Trash.
The Mac will not boot into Safe Mode; when I Shift-Click that button, the screen goes black and it stays that way forever.
How can I debug the login process and see what’s going wrong?
