mac is stuck in "Setting up Your Mac" during Catalona installation

Yes. As per my previous post my Mac os Catalina install was hanging with the display "Setting up your Mac".

The following occurred:-

1. I pressed the power off button until my MacBook pro switched off. This was instruction from Deangelis above.
2. I waited for 10 sec or so
3. I then pressed the power on
4. The system rebooted and completed the full Catalina install.

I hope the above helps.

Same challenge here. Mac os Catalina hangs "Setting up your Mac".

Hard Reboot and it starts up ok in the new OS.

Only down side is it has removed all personalised desktop pictures.

System Preferences (Not responding) > Desktop Picture (System Preferences) (Not responding).

System:

• MacBookPro 2012 with
• 1Tb SSd, and,
• i7 2.9Hhz

After a soft reboot/restart all sorted with manually replacing the desktop pictures.

Sad to say good bye to the DVD player app that was standard in the Utilities folder for years. RIP. It served me well for 10yrs

Same here. FWIW I can ssh into the machine and everything seems fine. It was running some of the usual background process (photoanalysisd and mds_stores) at fairly high cpu, and I tried to sending TERM to them, but it didn't help...

I recall a similar delay a while back (Mountain Lion?) which was very sensitive to the presence of lots of new non-MacOS files under /usr, as often happens with TeX installations. Don't know if that's related to what's happening here. (I installed the public beta on another machine a month or so ago and didn't run into this problem.)

I'll let it run a while longer, but I may resort to rebooting (which I'll probably do via ssh to allow some amount of the system taking care of itself).

Has anyone who sees this problem actually had the "setting up..." finish normally, or is a reboot required?

Also, can we think of anything that might be responsible for this? 2015 iMac with 3TB fusion drive. Lots of files in /usr/... installed through homebrew and MacTeX. Backblaze for backup, along with Time Machine. iCloud Desktop and Documents syncing. Not running filevault.

Yep, thanks.

To be clear, I understand that rebooting (etc) will (most likely) work. I was trying to figure out (a) what could be causing the issues and (b) whether rebooting is actually necessary, i.e., will "setting up..." perhaps eventually complete if I wait long enough? The evidence out there is that rebooting might indeed be needed since I have seen posts about waiting for many hours, but I fear a strong "selection effect" (people who wait a few hours but for whom the process eventually completes may not be tweeting or posting about it).

I understand and appreciate your approach. Mine was exactly the same.

Doing a cold reboot of a system during an OS upgrade, is normally high risk, based on my background.

Regarding you queries:-

a) What could be causing the issues?

Ans - This is an Apple only possible response. Catalina was only released formally in the last 48hrs or so.

b) Whether rebooting is actually necessary, i.e., will "setting up..." perhaps eventually complete if I wait long enough?

Ans - I waited between 3-4hrs or more. I did not use a stop watch. I fortunately was on my Mac mini when I started the MacBook update. My trusted MackBook pro has been very quick with 16Gb of ram and a brand new 1Tb ssd drive.

Just did the Catalina update on both my MacBook Air and my 2015 Mac. Both locked up on the “setting up your Mac” screen. Forced shutdown on both by holding in the power button. When they were turned back on, both completed the installation with no issues. All works normally now, with nothing lost. This does seem to be a very widespread issue, so something is off with the installation.

Hey,

Same issue. I left mine for 12 hours and nothing happened. I came home to find it stuck on the "Setting Up" page. Powered the machine off, waited 30 seconds, power back on and was able to get to the log in screen.

Same on my 2017 iMac. Power button reboot seemingly fixed it but had to "reselect" my desktop image. This was a brutally long upgrade. It took almost 2 hours to get to the point where it was stuck on "Setting up...." I waited another hour or so before hitting the reboot (with fingers crossed) after consulting the interwebs.

Really sloppy installer this time around. With so many betas, you'd think the installer would run without issue.

My MacBook Air Retina has gone through the various restarts and is now stuck on the Find My page. I pressed continue and nothing has happened for an hour. How do I force a restart?? (I'm new to Mac, recent convert from Windows!)

Same exact issue here. MacBook Pro, 3 years old.

yep that helped me to . thanx for the tip.

This worked for me too. Thank you.