Q: Install failure, hangs, and errors. Still trying...
I'm well over 24 hours into this current battle with my 2011 MacBook Pro. I wish I had taken better notes, so everything here will be from memory.
First I upgraded a 2008 MacBook Pro with no issue, so I was stoked thinking the newer MBP would be an even better candidate. Wrong.
The first issue I encountered after running the installer was an "Install failed" screen. This was after some 45 minutes. From the utility I attempted to repair, verify, and fix permissions of the Macintosh HD volume that was grayed out in disk utility. Some things took, but in the end the volume was not repaired nor could I select it for the start up disk or as a destination for a Time Machine restore.
I went ahead and erased the volume (I have a second partition for boot camp, by the way. I don't know if this is part of the issue or not. I left it there.) I was then able to restore my Time Machine backup to the newly initialized volume.
So, at this point I was at least back to where I started, though I had to let the restore run overnight since it was in the neighborhood of 6 hours. Then, I waited nearly the entire work day while Time Machine was indexing the old backups, making space for the new one, and then backing it up. Surprisingly, this was near six hours of my day. Moving forward, I still had the previous days backup, plus a newer one to make myself feel a little cozier.
Start Mavericks install attempt yet again. This seemed to make is somewhere after an hour or so. There was one password prompt that I could not figure out, so I ended up leaving it blank and it went away. It was something to the effect of entering my "login" keychain, though it didn't seem to take my normal password. Then I got to the "less than a minute remaining" screen. I let that run for over 60 minutes until I finally got tired of waiting.
Then I discovered I could still get up to the menu bar and pulled up the install log window. It was set to show errors and had been pushing out the same one for hours! Something I should have noted, but it was something to this effect, line after line after line:
OSInstaller[368] V /volumes/macintosh HD: DSDB
Then I realized it was hung in my professional opinion. So I tried to restart and select a startup disk, but that hung as well. Frustrated, extremely tired, and did I mention FRUSTRATED, I held ye olde power button until she blinked out.
Then I pushed the power button and it started in OS X 10.9...BUT it was a clean install and began the usual series of questions. Network, Apple ID, do I want to migrate, etc.. This wasn't feeling right to me, especially since the 2008 MBP did no such thing. It just worked.
So now it's restoring yet again from Time Machine for Monday, pre-Mavericks attempts, to make yet another go of it tomorrow. I hate to blast my Boot Camp partition away and attempt to remove that from the equation, but I don't know what else to try and I'm pretty worn out.
Comment if you have any solutions or can verify the things I've brought up. I couldn't find a single piece out there about the error logs
MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.5), Windows Boot Camp partition
Posted on Oct 23, 2013 11:57 PM