Running Catalina, do the following:
- open a terminal window and type csrutil status. You should get a response of System Integrity Protection status: disabled.
- If it comes back as enabled, it’s time for the Restart, Command R movement once again. (I understand you’ve done this a number of times, but humor me please). Press and hold Command R when the screen goes totally dark. Don’t wait, just press them and show the machine who’s boss.
- When the Recovery window appears, select Utilities from the top bar (I know, I know, but someone else may have never done this before).
- When the drop-down menu appears, select Terminal.
- in the terminal window, type csrutil disable
You should get a message that SIP is disabled. (that’s the hope anyway) - In the terminal window, type reboot and theoretically the machine will reboot.
- After the machine reboots, log in, open a terminal window and type csrutil status.
- It should give you the SIP disabled message.
- Back through the shutdown/Command R routine once again.
- Recovery Window / Utilities / terminal.
- In the terminal window, type the following: csrutil enable --without debug —without fs
that’s the entire command, those are double – and you can do it all on one line. - You’ll get the stern warning that you’re using a non-standard SIP configuration. Tell the machine “so what!” and type reboot in the terminal window.
- Log in, open a terminal window and type csrutil status. It should come back with unsupported configuration, but big deal.
- If you are manually loading Total Spaces, do it now, if you have it load in the Users & Groups / Login Items list, check to see if it’s loaded. As long as you are staying with Catalina you will no longer have to do the recovery step to update or modify Total Spaces. Unfortunately, that’s not true of Big Sur (or Big Slur, depending on how you feel about the new beta).
- If it is still non-functional, it’s time for the nuclear option. Back up everything, go to recovery mode, open Disk Util, highlight Macintosh-HD Data, select the Minus sign at the top of Disk Util to delete the volume (you did make a back up, right?). Once the Data disk is no longer present, highlight Macintosh HD, select Erase, select a name you like (Macintosh HD is my favorite), select APFS for the file system, and watch it delete everything. Install a new copy of Catalina and it should work.
I actually assume you’ve already tried all of this, but sometimes installing a new copy of the OS fixes lots of strange problems. BTW, have you created other partitions on your new drive or used the default install to take care of using the disk?