Catalina Setup hangs . Anyone else?

Funny thing

while writing on this page with my iPad mini, the Mac went into sleep, I woke it up Tom login screen, but I select another user, I was able to login without problem, I logout, log back in my account , still stuck at the Setting Up Your Mac. So I did the force restart, and it worked.

I have been Apple DOS since 1981 then using Mac OS since 1989, ans macOS X since the first beta Rhapsody in 1997.

never had a problem until today. Scary...

After 4 hours of no progress I restarted twice. Same issue so I went to bed and woke up to my iMac upgraded. Took almost 11 hours. I also decided to "skip" the screen time set-up as people reported this step hanging (or at least taking over an hour).

Yeah, I just found the same advice on a load of other threads. Happy to say that I'm posting this from my Mac. The reboot works with no issues that I can see. Good luck with the reboot!

Hold down the power button for about 10 seconds, until the power indicator on the front turns off. Then you can start it up normally.

On my office mac upgrade it was stuck on the screen time page for an hour until I did a hard reset. Maybe best to "Skip until later" on that page.

i just read a discussion on Macrumors and many people had the same problem. They just rebooted, and it worked.

i have been waiting two hours, and still stuck there. I going to sleep but I am pretty sure tomorrow morning the "Setting Up Your Mac" will still be there, and I will have to force restart like everybody else.

All went well...I powered my MBA off and then powered back up and it went directly to the new macOS Catalina start page. I logged into my MBA and it went to the Welcome to Catalina (Explore Catalina). All of my favorites are there in Safari. I opened Mail and got the popup window "Mail Upgrade"...Upgrading your Mail database...this may take a few minutes. While you wait you can read about the new features in Mail...(I have a VERY LARGE Mail database)

Everything seems is copasetic...so now my iPhone X (waiting for my iPhone 11) is on iOS 13.1.2, both my iPad Pro and iPad Air 2 are on iPadOS 13.1.2...and, hopefully, they will all talk to one another and stay in sync.

Mine took over 10 hours to upgrade. At first I thought it was hung but went to bed and woke up to Catalina. FYI...skip setting up the screen time process until later. Seemed to just hang my machine.

Catalina installed but when I pressed skip the screen time reporting, then it was hanging for 30 min. I pressed the power button for 10 seconds to power off. Afterwards it booted into Catalina but it offered to install Catalina again.

Similar issue with MacMini 2018, except screen was blank. Left it that way over night and it was still not responsive in the morning. I did a force power restart, and it came up.

My MBA has been sitting on “Setting Up This Mac” with the spinning wheel for 13 hours. It got this far before we started dinner and then I kept checking and finally went to bed...now, 13 hours later...it’s still spinning and “setting up my Mac”

I did the reboot too but my messages are no longer synced and I don't seem to be able to get them back. Wondered if it was because I did the restart (well actually switched it off, went to bed really late and switched it on again this morning!) but there are others with the same problem who don't mention rebooting.

Ah! Just rebooted again and all my messages are back!

‘Upgraded’ to Catalina on 8 October 2019 and after downloading it got stuck at system setup - ran overnight and was still stuck in the morning - called Apple support and after 15 minutes on hold I had a tech who worked with me for >1 hour to restart which was fine and then he went above and beyond to help me check on, run first aid and reset some things. Thank you Mark in Kentucky !!!

Tell me how you did the force restart. My mac started install and froze. Will not do backup or recovery starts. Thanks