Unable to run Updates - Solved

[J Lamp]

I have a couple rigs right now that are running Big Sur 11.6.1, one is an older x79 booting with Clover, the other is a newer Z490 booting with opencore; neither machine will update to 11.6.2.

 

The 11.6.2 update will download and do its thing, on a reboot there is no "installer" drive available in the boot menu. The system will reboot and spend about 10 minutes on what appears to be an installer screen (starts at about 10 minutes remaining) then drops me back on the desktop on the prior version (11.6.1.)

 

I've seen a number of comments online with update issues relating to SIP. SIP is enabled on both systems, 0x03 on Clover, fully enabled default settings on opencore.

 

As a test, on the x79 with Clover I did a fresh install of 11.6.1 on a spare drive, then was able to successfully update it to 11.6.2 using the same configuration of Clover, so the issue is apparently not the boot loader or SIP configuration. With this test I do get the installer option on the boot loader and multiple reboots during the update, as I would expect.

 

Both drives are cloned using SuperDuper, so there is something in the original OS itself that is causing this. These installs were also "migrated" from Catalina. I typically do a clean install on a major update then migrate the users and apps. These are production machines, that way in a worst case scenario I can just swap in the old drive and be back up and running. I have no idea if the migration or the cloning caused the problem.

 

Has anyone seen this before? Can anyone suggest a fix?

 

There's a lot of music production software on these, I'd rather not have to start from scratch with clean installs and reinstalling all the software.

 

 

Edited January 29, 2022 by J Lamp

[J Lamp]

In the end the issue was being caused by the Migration Assistant. When migrating applications the assistant was also bringing over old kexts that were installed in S/L/E. These are legitimate kexts for some older Apogee audio hardware, but under the new configuration this was "breaking the seal" on the system partition and not allowing system updates as Mac OS considered the system partition compromised.

 

You would think that these should have been moved to the "Relocated Items" folder, but apparently not. 

 

In the end a clean install and reinstall of the applications solved the issue.

 

As for the older audio interface, I was able to manually install the kexts into L/E (they didn't work from the EFI) but after messing with that there turned out to be a simpler solution.

 

Apogee "officially" does not support the older Symphony64 audio interface cards, but after digging into one of the newer installer packages from them, the kext was still there. I ran the installer, it installed to L/E, afterwards the audio interface worked and the system updated without any issues.

 

It would seem that as the OS transitions to a more secure system you need to be careful if you are using the Migration Assistant. You can end up going down a blind alley and getting stuck.