Catalina installation stuck

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 read that others who were stuck rebooted and things finished up quickly. I got stuck, so I did a restart, and things finished up quickly. Been using Catalina for hours now and everything seems fine. So I think restarting is the trick to get through the Stuck.

Thanks for posting this. I’m fed up after more than an hour of ‘Estimating time remaining’ However, if you said it took three hours, I’ll be more patient – but I had work to do tonight.

Apple really ought to make it look like installs are progressing or they will get a lot of people thinking they have hung machines. This is really very poor.

Waited 20 hours while the installation seemed to be stuck at the startup with the black background with the progress bar only and a indicating about 90% complete.

i forced reboot and got the Catalina background with my account icon and name, along with the same progress bar stuck at 90%. It has been going on for 14 hours now and no changes on the progress bar.

RIP Steve... you are missed!

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.

Same problem here. The bar isn't moving a bit for over an hour. What has happened to the quality of Apple? Steve Jobs must be rolling in his grave. Who would've thought that putting a soulless accountant in charge of Apple would lead to problems?!?

So mine has been mine has been stuck for about 17 hours at the All black screen with the white Apple logo the progress bar is almost full but has not moved in hours. I am not having the thing where it says setting up mine is basically the screen where it appears that it’s downloading or installing. I’ve tried rebooting but no success. I can’t enter safe mode either, how do I access the menu where I could potentially do a restore from Time Machine? Thank you

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 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.

I don’t actually see the answer to the question anywhere on this whine fest. My mac pro lacked memory for the install, and gave me only one option to get out of the frozen state (clicking ‘Restart’). When I do it stupidly attempts to install Catalina again. I want out. Fuck the update, I’m a busy person. What do I do? Escape doesn’t work. CNTRL FUC DELETE doesn’t work nor any other obvious combo. Please advise.

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.

Thanks. Wouldn’t it have been a simple thing to insert a sniff for disc capacity in the update script? What a lot of trouble that we little people didn’t need to bear. Ugh. Thanks to Miner2008 -that worked.

When I first went to download Catalina the download itself seemed to stall once it finished. I tried restarting the download multiple times and it stayed stuck at 8.09GB of 8.09GB. I restarted my computer and it said it installed. Then when I logged on it said I needed to update my OS to Catalina, which I thought I had just done. I downloaded it again and my computer restarted and then I sat there for 50 minutes without it budging a single centimeter.

Contacted support. We tried to boot my Mac every which way possible to no avail for 4 hours. They suggested I go to a store and made me an appointment. Then I saw this thread. That was an hour and a half ago. It’s not 8am and this is the first time I’ve seen my log in screen since 2:30.

This update does indeed seem to be ridiculously long.

Bless your patience. 49 hours. Honestly the most frustrating part was that the progress bar didn’t move to indicate that it was doing anything. It would say ‘40 minutes’ then ‘estimating time remaining...’ then ‘17 minutes’ then ‘32’ and so on and so on all night throughout every boot up and Apple Support was convinced it was a hard drive issue with my Mac which was working perfectly right before I installed the update. My 6 hours seem a mere pittance compared to your 49 hours. You deserve a medal for patience.

In my case the update was stuck for over 60 hours.

I rebooted the iMac into internet recovery and saw that there was not enough space on the hard drive (3TB FD).

Before the upgrade I hat ~350GB space available.

I solved this by creating a bootable MacOS on an USB drive. Booted the iMac from this USB drive. Copied some data (700GB) to another external drive and had ~1TB free space.

After that I started the internet recovery and the upgrade went well in under 1 hour.

My guess is that due to the changed in disk volumes the upgrade may be stuck or very very slow due to less space.