Okay so this is going to be long but here it goes.... I have a 2020 Intel Chip MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. When a new beta is released, I will download it and when installing, select my external development drive as the target. However, this beta gave me no options to install to any drive and instead updated my internal HD to Sonoma. After the install completed, the Mac rebooted to a screen that showed a yellow exclamation point and said that the OS needed to be reinstalled and told me to boot into recovery. No matter what key combination I use, recovery will not boot. Luckily, I managed to save the hard drive from an old iMac that I lost when my home burned down last year and had been using it to boot to when I needed something off it. So I booted it up. When I tried to download the beta it told me I had to be running Ventura, so I attempted to just install Ventura onto the internal drive since I already had the installer downloaded and it told me it could not be downgraded. So I updated the iMac drive to Ventura. Then I'm a moment of stupidity thought maybe I missed something with the Sonoma Beta that didn't allow me to select the drive, so I tried again clicking download. Only to be smacked in the face by another failed install. Now I have no bootable OS and I'm unable to get into any version of Recovery. I've booted in Verbose mode and do see a lot of errors but it goes so fast I can't seem to read any. Now, I have been able to get to the login screen on the built in HD but once I type my password, the fans go full speed for a millisecond and then it crashes and reboots. The only way I can get to this login screen is by resetting PRAM and then booting. But only if I reset PRAM. However, now I'm not even able to get there. Now all I get is a "your system rebooted because of an error" in multiple languages screen and then the fans go full speed and it reboots to the same. Hen I was still able to get to the login screen if I did nothing for a while it would eventually boot into a password recovery OS where I could reset password or choose startup disk but that is all. One of the options under password recovery was if my password wasnt being typed because of a keyboard issue and it was odd that the solution was to turn off filevault, but because I work at home and haven't been able to get any help from apple and need to pay bills, I thought maybe if I follow these instructions it could work. I had a similar issue several years ago with another beta and filevault and figured maybe filevault isn't at the top of apples list on orerelease softwares and gave it a shot. I clicked decrypt, and in only 2 seconds my drive was decrypted. Which can't be possible, but that's what it said and told me to reboot. That's when I was no longer able to get to anything but the "your system rebooted because of a problem" screen and where I am currently stuck. I already have a box to send It in however when I booted up into my iMac drive got a notification telling me my time machine backups were out of date so I dug into this and discovered not only the iMac was out of date but the internal drive hadn't backed up to my time machine drive in nearly 8 months but had given me no indication that it wasn't working as expected. So needless to say, the work I've done over the past 8 months I can not afford to lose, it's just not an option and I haven't sent in my machine for this reason until I'm able to fix this issue and back up all my files. Normally I would just use another machine but I don't have another one anymore and anywhere I can think of that has Macs I can use, definitely won't let me plug in an external drive to repair. I also live in the middle of the desert, 100 miles from the nearest best buy and 200 miles from the nearest apple store. So, my options are to fix it at home or risk a lawsuit from my clients for losing their files along with anything else I've done for the past 8 months. Had I had any indication or knowledge that this beta would be unlike every other beta I've ever been a part of, and not allow me to select the destination drive for install, I would have stopped everything. But there was no indication. This seems like a serious issue to me since it has and is costing me a lot of money that Apple certainly isn't going to cover. I can't be the only one with this issue since it happened to two of my installs. That can't be a coincidence. I've scheduled a callback from a senior advisor but she had no availability for a week, and I can't afford to be without work for another week, plus she really didn't grasp the seriousness of this and didn't make me feel comfortable with her ability to solve this issue. I used to work for Apple and was Mobile and Mac certified before they became lifetime certs, so I'm no dummy and very familiar with standard and advanced triage, but very little to none with betas. So this is my Hail Mary. Engineers? Help? Thank you for reading and any support you can offer. Cheers! JTM