Catalina installation stuck

Restarted the virtual machine after taking a snapshot for safety, and it went through the progress bar and is stuck at the same place again.. so at least it knows how to recover itself even through a restart.. I've read and been told to just wait, that this installation takes anywhere from 3 to 8 to 24 hours to install, fortunately computers can just be left on to do their thing, I imagine Apple will fix this, as it doesn't need that much time, it's definitely a loop, oh mine just changed, restarting may have helped, I'm up to the password login window... yay... I didn't have to wait it out, restarting is the thing.

I had the same problem on my 2018 MB Pro. I discovered part of the issue was it was having a hard time connecting to Wi-Fi in the background as did the install on a friends network and hadn’t saved the PW. I just turned on personal hotspot on my phone and it connected and finished fairly quickly. Didn’t realize it was connecting once the actual install begun but apparently it does. It will took an hour but had been stuck for hours when I tried this approach. Bad update from Apple.

After 3 days with the stuck startup screen and restarting a handful times without success, what worked for me was doing a restart, pressing control-R to go into recovery mode. Then reinstalled MAC OS. After the reinstall, my iMac booted and I can use the computer again.

Seeing the advice to be VERY patient, I waited a few hours and let it go overnight. When it was still the same next morning I forced shutdown by holding down the power button for a few seconds, and then restarted it and got my High Sierra login window displayed, and entered my password. It then had the black screen with apple logo saying "Estimating time remaining, then shortly afterward said "About 27 minutes remaining" This countdown continued over the next 20 minutes till it got to 9 minutes remaining, then a black screen with the apple logo, a couple more automatic re-boots and then I saw my first Catalina Island wallpaper, entered my password and all proceeded from there over the next 15 minutes - and it was all done and working!

I'm on a 2017 IMac using normally speedy wifi. It took approximately 12 - 14hours to download and then another 14 hours to install. I bought a 3 year service plan with this computer so called Apple Care to see what was going on. I was told that Catalina upgrades to 64 bit - on some IMacs a slow process. Once it finally finished everything was fine.

Just to report my experience -- after leaving my Mac at "calculating time remaining" for 5 hours, i went to bed. Woke up 7 hours later to find a nice, happy Catalina login screen. So be patient and your upgrade will probably go OK.

And to answer my own question, hopefully without angering Allan Eckert, when the upgrader appears to be stuck for hours and Control + L doesn't work, it doesn't necessarily mean that it has hung. I couldn't get supplemental info on the upgrade by doing Control + L but the upgrade still completed. Hopefully that is useful yo people in their long wait for the upgrade to complete.

Yes, after restarting it finished immediately, did not get stuck anymore, came up very fast through the last stages on installation, setting up your Mac, et al, and came up to the Finder with the Island picture. So Restarting when it's stuck will speed things up.

I too was stuck in "Setting up your Mac" for hours. Powered off at the button, let it sit a few minutes, powered on, the Mac loaded up, and I guess things are fine. Things are quirky but it's probably Catalina bugs.

When it gets stuck, reboot. Many of us have done it to good effect. Apple called me and we discussed it and they got my logs to see what happened on my machine. They are on it. Dont wait hours, when it's stuck reboot, it should pick up again and finish.

I started the install on my iMac 5k at 09:38 it is now 18:30 and the bar has only just started moving - from about 10% to 75% in the last 30minutes.. My MacBook pro took about an hour..

I suspect (with no evidence at all) that this is the crappy fusion drive in the iMac..

Stuck on estimating time remaining as well. Upgrading a Mojave VMware Fusion virtual machine, which I know from others ultimately works. Mojave was working fine on the VM. Main Mac OS is Mojave. Putting this early Catalina on a VM because I have 32 bit apps I can't give up quite yet. Have read on the web NUMEROUS people get stuck at this point and also at another point. Some have forced it down and upon restarting it picked up better, and moved on... so it seems like it really is stuck, though I read here where others say they waited it out for 8 hours or whatever.. I'm tempted to force it down, but I dont know for sure yet what I'll do. Apple needs to address this.

After 20 hours the progress bar was stuck at about 10% so I booked an online chat with Apple. The helper was not able to figure it out and suggested I tried a reboot. This just took me back to the same position so he arranged a genius appointment for friday afternoon, ( I.e. two days hence) and indicted there might be a charge for fixing it which I wasn’t prepared to accept. I just left my Mac on with the bar now at 15% . After 48 hours I looked in on the way to bed and the bar was at 98%. 1 hour later the room next door lit up and I found the Catalina screen displayed. Clicked 'set up my Mac' and went to bed. Next morning the Computer was still not set up. After reading some posts on here, I rebooted and the computer displayed my desktop. Cancelled the genius.

Lesson learned next time I’ll hold fire before updating.

If it gets stuck, on one thing, many of us had it on "Estimating time remaining", then reboot again. Apparently they have some bugs in this set of installers, they rely on code objects, that used to work, they're as surprised as us. It's a problem they're working on, but for now...

Reboot, power off and back on, it's stuck in a loop, it will pick up where it left off and be faster at completing, many have done it, do it. For me it finished immediately after I rebooted.