Problems installing macOS Monterey 12.6.1

A short while ago, my iMac and my MBP both noted under Software Update that macOS Monterey 12.6.1 was available for installation. With these incremental upgrades, I don’t usually think twice, and I upgraded my MBP yesterday or the day before.

This evening, I upgraded my iMac and ran into some serious problems — logging into my regular (Standard) user account resulted in a hung machine that required a forced power-off. Logging into my admin account was fine.

Eventually, I believe I traced the source of the problem to the fact that my regular account has the Home directory on an external 4 TB SSD. I’ve long kept my internal SSDs for System and Applications and put my user directory on an external drive (formerly HD, now SSD). Since my user directories have long grown beyond 1 TB, it saves me having to pay for Apple’s 4 TB internal drives. It also provides other conveniences, e.g. when I upgrade my user drive, or migrate to a new machine, etc.

Upon closer examination, it seems the upgrade process — somewhere along the line, not sure when — renamed my external SSD from “[external drive name] HD” to “[external drive name] HD 1”, seen via the command line in /Volumes, while it had the old name on the Desktop. There was also a new directory in /Volumes called “[external drive name] HD”, but this was stored on the internal SSD (“Macintosh HD”). For some reason, the owner was root and the group was _analyticsusers.

The conflicting names couldn’t be universally safe, especially since I might have some hardcoded stuff with the correct, original home directory naming in the Unix layer, so I su’d to my admin account and sudo mv’d the directory and volume back to what I originally intended, then deleted the new, unexpected directory.

So far — that is, in the past half hour since I did these things — everything seems okay.

But as a result of this evening’s problems, I’m not eager to upgrade to Ventura any time soon. (Edit: It shouldn’t be a problem with my MBP, which is a 2016 MBP and not compatible with Ventura…)

-awlabrador

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My experience with 12.6.1 has been great. For the past several upgrades my 2018 Intel MacMini has slowing down. I was just assuming that the updates were requiring more of the hardware than it was capable of delivering efficiently. I was hoping the the Mini would last until its M2 version and was pricing M1 Minis in case it didn’t. 12.6.1 changed every thing. The system launches faster; apps launch faster; processes are faster. It is like I have a new computer. I will probably hold off on Ventura until at least a .01 update or maybe even a .1 update.

Well what do you know: an Apple software update actually made something better for a change. :slight_smile:

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12.6.1 may be the Snow Leopard (I think that was the one where Apple didn’t do anything big but did everything right.) of the California named OS series.

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