Last week, I wrote about how I was proud of failing again when I corrupted my Photo Mechanic Plus catalog and had to rebuild it. That was frustrating, but the path to fixing it was clear.
This week brought a much bigger challenge.
I had installed OpenCore Legacy on my older 2016 MacBook Pro to keep running the latest macOS. It had been working fine—until Apple released macOS Tahoe. Without thinking it through, I let my machine automatically upgrade.
That was my mistake.
OpenCore Legacy didn’t yet support Tahoe, and the upgrade instantly turned my computer into a brick.
Recovering from this took me more than two days of trial and error. At first, I tried restoring from Time Machine, but I didn’t realize it only works if the system runs the same macOS version you backed up from. My machine wasn’t, so I ran into a mess of error codes.
I tried rolling back to Catalina. I tried multiple Sequoia jump-drive installs using OpenCore. At one point, I even questioned whether my installer drive was the problem—so I rebuilt that too.
The real turning point came when I discovered that my Sequoia install had never been correctly set up in the first place. Once I finally got the system running on Sequoia again, I could restore from Time Machine.
What did I learn from all this? Two simple things:
- Turn off automatic upgrades. Primarily, if you’re running patched or non-standard software.
- Check compatibility first. Just because Apple releases a new OS doesn’t mean everything in your workflow—or your hardware—will play nicely with it.
It was a hard lesson that took a lot of time, but I’ll never forget it. Sometimes, our biggest failures become the most memorable teachers.