Boot Repair
Repair Environment
Due to some of the ongoing work around system encryption and homed integration, it's evident that a bootable recovery environment is needed to address errors that are incurred sometimes before the OS can boot, namely:
- a change in hardware or firmware or the possibility that malware got into the bootloader, that requires user intervention
It's also clear that relying on Plymouth is insufficient here in terms of UI, a11y and translation, so a minimal initial-setup-like session paired with a recovery application is the current line of thinking.
Relevant Material
macOS
Recovery Session with Utilities App
available actions:
- restore from backup (Time Machine)
- reinstall OS
- disk utility
- regular Mac disk utility
- support links
- opens local documentation in a web view (Safari)
additional utilities:
- startup security
- adjusting firmware settings
- networking
- terminal access
Intel Macs:
Apple Silicon:
Windows 10/11
Entering When Error
- prompted to automatically fix the issue
- presented with advanced options (see below)
Manually Boot
primary actions:
- continue to boot
- troubleshoot
- shut down
advanced actions
- boot repair
- change startup settings
- system rollback (via system restore and undoing updates)
- UEFI settings (reboots to firmware)
- terminal/cli access
Edited by Sam Hewitt