2015 Air (A1466 with 4gb ram) won't update to Catalina

Question

2015 Air (A1466 with 4gb ram) won't update to Catalina

A customer of mine is trying to update her 2015 macbook air (A1466 [EMC 2925] with 4gb ram) but when she tries to run the update the status bar fills up part way and fails out.

She meets the minimum specs according to apple (bare minimum imo) and she spent several days going back and forth with apple trying to fix it and they couldn't figure it out.

I remoted in and was able to duplicate the problem. I opened the console and got a copy of the log but I'm not sure what to look for. I searched the word "update" and "fail" but there was a lot to sort through.

Most of the problems I'm finding on google do not have the same symptoms of this update problem.

Has anyone run into this problem or is anyone able to tell me what to search for in the log? Thanks a lot in advance.

MacBook Air

Posted on Mar 2, 2020 6:47 AM

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Answer 1

macjack

Level 10

111,242 points

Mar 2, 2020 6:52 AM in response to buddycomputers

You can try installing in Safe Mode but with 4GB RAM Catalina will not run very well as it uses more resources than previous systems. I would discourage her from moving higher than Mojave.

Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 2

John Galt

Level 10

155,714 points

Mar 2, 2020 8:22 AM in response to buddycomputers

buddycomputers wrote:

From what I remember it was 17gb of free space ...

That probably won't be enough.

Read How to upgrade to macOS Catalina.

4 GB RAM should be ok. Not great, but ok.

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Answer 3

Mar 2, 2020 8:02 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

From what I remember it was 17gb of free space but I just messaged the customer to confirm. Thanks for your quick reply.

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Answer 4

Mar 2, 2020 6:58 AM in response to buddycomputers

One very common problem is lack of hard disk space. People think that they can install with only some 10GB of free space, but they can't.

How much free space is there in this case?

Note that I am NOT talking about RAM. Indeed, 4 GB of RAM is not amazing, but Catalina CAN work with that (just do not expect the greatest performance, and avoid running to many things at once, and you'll do fine).

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