Mac not working - white circle and bar?

[Northern_Piper]

Weird thing with our Mac - after entering the user password, it comes up with a black screen with a white circle and bar (like the red symbol for “no” only white.

Anyone have any idea why?

[IvoryTowerDenizen]

According to Apple support, it’s a problem with MacOS

If your Mac doesn't start up all the way

If you scroll down here, there are some suggestions on a fix
MacBook Pro / Circle with Slash on Startup - Apple Community (No clue how useful they are though)

[beowulff]

Yeah, that’s bad.
That means the machine got a kernel panic early in the boot process. You need to re-install the OS from the recovery partition.

[Northern_Piper]

Thank you.

All I really understand is “that’s bad”

Off to the Mac shop we go for the repairs.

[jz78817]

@beowulff

Yeah, that’s bad.
That means the machine got a kernel panic early in the boot process. You need to re-install the OS from the recovery partition.

basically the Mac version of a Blue Screen of Death.

[Northern_Piper]

Mac guy said that it needs to be re-loaded with OS, plus there may be some physical damage …
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Johnny_L.A]

@beowulff

Yeah, that’s bad.
That means the machine got a kernel panic early in the boot process. You need to re-install the OS from the recovery partition.

I back up my Mac to an external drive using Time Machine. In the event this ever happens to me, can I boot from the external drive? (If so, how?)

[Pork_Rind]

@Johnny_L.A

I back up my Mac to an external drive using Time Machine. In the event this ever happens to me, can I boot from the external drive? (If so, how?)

A Time Machine backup is not bootable. It’s a pile of incremental backups that get re-assembled when restoring to a fresh drive. I use Time Machine for long term backups (“pretty sure I had the file I need four months ago” type stuff), but for emergency bootable backups, I have Carbon Copy Cloner make a complete, bootable backup to an external drive every evening.

And since fire or theft or earthquake could wipe out both backups at the same time, I make sure that everything that would be hard to recover (not apps, not the system) in the cloud as well.

[beowulff]

@Johnny_L.A

I back up my Mac to an external drive using Time Machine. In the event this ever happens to me, can I boot from the external drive? (If so, how?)

You can’t boot from it, but you can use the Recovery Partition (boot with the cmd-R keys held down) to restore from it.

[Johnny_L.A]

@beowulff

You can’t boot from it, but you can use the Recovery Partition (boot with the cmd-R keys held down) to restore from it.

I had no idea such a thing existed.

[beowulff]

@Johnny_L.A

I had no idea such a thing existed.

It’s pretty handy.
It will even allow you to re-install from the Internet (direct download from Apple’s site), as long as you have working WiFi or Ethernet. Not the fastest way to recover, but better than staring at a dead machine…

[Pork_Rind]

@beowulff

It’s pretty handy.
It will even allow you to re-install from the Internet (direct download from Apple’s site), as long as you have working WiFi or Ethernet. Not the fastest way to recover, but better than staring at a dead machine…

Similarly, there’s a recovery partition on the Mac’s internal drive too. So if somehow the system becomes corrupt but the drive is still good, you can boot and reinstall just as beowulff described.