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macOS Monterey Locks Me Out of my 2019 Mac Pro after Shutown/Reboot, Both Admin Accounts Kaput

Shutdown your Mac normally, and then lose your ability to login and maybe all your data too?

Back in March, I wrote that macOS Monterey Locks Me Out of my 2019 Mac Pro after Reboot, Repudiating my Login Password.

This has now happened 4 times in the past 9 months, including today.

How can Apple let this bug keep happening? Simple: poorly tested and flaky software from Apple has been the rule for the better part of decade now. Apple is a phone company with computers an afterthought, with all software shipped on a calendar schedule, ready or not, bugs and all. Witness the frenzied series of updates to fix bugs after each and every calendar-drive release of iOS or mac OS each autumn. Ship it, and fix (some) of the bugs later, repeat ad nauseum.

My 2019 iMac 5K has run flawlessly since the day I bought it, including getting a lot of abuse in my Sprinter van including a major dent after falling off a table to the floor. It just keeps working, always boots up, never flakes.

Summarizing, macOS Monterey:
a)
Locked me out of both admin accounts, apparently via some T2 security chip bug (or software bug involving it),
(b) Seemingly corrupted my primary volume (system update did it?), a volume that never before in 2.5 years has had any issue, and has always verified A-OK.

I rue the purchase of my 2019 Mac Pro with its festering T2 turd chip. Worst waste of money in my life. A full refund for this lemon design would be awesome but battling with Apple over it seems unlikely to succeed and be a massive time sink.

Meanwhile, my iPhone 7 Plus also died overnight (charging failure, nowhere near the Mac Pro!), so I cannot even use my regular phone. When it rains it pours, but that was two nights ago. Well, it’s a very old phone so I can forgive that breakdown. UPDATE: I got the phone fixed with a new battery and a cleaned-out Lightning port, and it only took me 3.5 hours to get the done, on top of two hours for the Mac Pro fiasco. But at least both are working normally again.

Locked out, main data volume damaged too!

Yesterday, I updated to the latest macOS Monterey; perhaps that is involved?

All went well and I used the Mac Pro all day after the update. Later that day it would not sleep; one display would stay lit up, yet another new bug? So I did a Shutdown to turn it off overnight. A nice clean normal shutdown.

Booting up the next morning, the Mac Pro refused my login password as invalid. I had created a 2nd admin account just in case. That password for that 2nd admin account was also repudiated. No, this is not a Caps Lock issue or anything like that. I know that because I’ve had to deal with this bug 4 times in the past 9 months. Sometimes simple reboot fixes it. Not today (several reboots including pulling power plug, etc). No joy.

Upon bootup into Recovery Mode, the same password rejected minutes ago was accepted. If that is not proof of a really bad bug around account login, I don’t know what is. BTW I do not use any Cloud password anything, just local password.

Now in Recovery Mode and with my password accepted, I ran a Disk Utility -> First Aid check on my main volume. Disk Utility reported a long and convoluted error message including:

error: unable to perform repairs without full space verification
error: Try running fsck against the entire APFS container instead of the volume /dev/rdisk3s6 could not be verified completely

How does a user run fsck or know the command and arguments to use? What kind of asshole programmer inserts a message like that which only an expert could possibly figure out? Not helpful!

So I selected the main APFS container in Disk Utility and let it run, the boot volume checked out fine, and then it started complaining about issues like those shown above on my main data volume..

UPDATE: after rebooting uot of Recover Mode (Disk Utility usage only, no system install or such), my screens were all screwed up (fiddled around with that and fixed), but I was able to login without issue, proving that the T2 security chip password bug is a nasty one (no change to password). Disk Utility repaired the minor errors on my main data volume too.

How in hell would a normal user deal with this kind of insane bug? Take it to the Apple Store, have them wipe out the entire computer and start from scratch? Shame on you Apple.

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