Reference Purple Screen of Death Appearing More n M… - Apple Community
I tried to reply but thread is closed.
Greetings,
BLUF: Booting M1 and above, and macking without external drives might allow fixes to work. This is inconclusive.
Signs and Symptoms
Upon Normal or Safe Boot:
Login normal or safe, PSOD may happen anytime before or after login.
Recovery Mode, PSOD does not happen, allowing you to invoke Disk Utility from there,
Mouse and keyboard work for 40 seconds
Desktop icons may or may not be scrambled.
41 seconds, Cursor freezes
In 1 second,
Screen dark
Flashes bright purple
Screen dark
Mac reboots
History of the Purple Screen of Death
According to various websites, it all started with System Big Sur
PSOD strikes at least thru System Sequoia; unknown if Apple fixed it in System Tahoe or above,
Trigger: Unknown.
Speculative Trigger: PSOD will trigger if there is a mounted external drive that it doesn't like.
The Cure - None, or Unknown
How to get back to normal until PSOD strikes again.
Unplug Mac to reset the NVRAM and plug it back in.
Unplug external drive(s)
Boot into Recovery Mode
Do disk utility first aid on boot volume.
Plug in external drive and do same to it.
Unmount and unplug external drive(s).
Does this fix anything? Unknown.
Next, Power OFF, boot into Safe Mode
Run Onyx
After Onyx reboots normal mode, login and wait 41 seconds, cross your fingers and plug external drive(s) back in.
If your monitor is a gaming monitor, PSOD will raise the refresh rate, which, of course is impossible, but PSOD does it anyway..
Pure Speculation as to the cause. I think something diddles with the EFI volume.
Recommendation (if I may), Anyone who knows an Apple employee, please ask em to go thru the system source code, to whatever triggers PSOD, and fix it.
Lofty Recommendation (never happen): Add menu to Disk Utility for something like, "Recover from The Purple Screen of Death."
Thanks for indulging this, hopefully it will help someone get thru PSOD.
