I have an early 2015 Macbook Pro, and had High Sierra installed, on which I started having booting issues, due to which I finally resorted to a clean re-install via recovery mode to Catalina.
I was expecting some kind of new user setup on the new install, but when I fired it up, it reached the login screen. I could see the wallpaper, boot icons, text boxes and the blank user icon, but there was no text visible anywhere(No Username below the user icon, placeholder text in the text-boxes, {Sleep, Restart, Shut Down} below their respective icons)
P.S. On the upper tray, battery percentage and the Time still showed up as text.
Here's what I've tried-
I booted into safe mode. That made the text show up, but now I had the issue of no user being available on the system. The username below the blank user icon was "Other...". I tried logging in with blank parameters, the login on my previous install, the classic root/toor. None of them worked.
I booted in recovery mode, opened terminal-
/sbin/fsck -fy #found no errors(It showed underallocated memory on my previous install, so guess that was fixed) /sbin/mount -uw / rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone #This file was not found, confirmed with `ls -al /var/db/` reboot
Didn't change a thing.
In recovery mode, clicked Apple > Startup Disk Selected 'Macintosh HD C macOS, 10.15.6'(the only available option) and then Restart Again, took me to the text-less login screen.
Opened Disk Utility in recovery mode This was the disk structure-
INTERNAL
|-Macintosh HD C APFS MacOS 10.15.6 11.08GB/500.07GB
|-Macintosh HD C -Data APFS MacOS 10.15.6 40.25GB/500.07GB
Disk Images
|-macOS Base System DI Vol. MacOS 10.15.6 1.35GB/2GB
Ran the first aid on all volumes, no issues found, and didn't fix my problem.
Any help with this issue would be appreciated. This was my first time using a Mac, I hope I haven't made any blunders in the above solutions.