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f9419 Author

Level 1

12 points

MacBook Pro not booting up - stuck on updating screen

I recently started trying to get my MacBook Pro (13 inch, late 2011) all up to date after neglecting it for a few years. I asked for advice on how to update it and followed the advice I was given. I then restarted the computer which opened to the white updating screen (with Apple logo and progress bar). It all seemed normal until the bar reached halfway and the computer crashed. I tried just turning it on and letting it load many more times but every time when the bar reaches halfway, the computer crashes. I looked up online tutorials for help and followed everything they said and even tried to factory reset from the Mac OS recovery page and it wouldn’t even let me do that (could not unmount disk).

If anyone could help it would be massively appreciated. I am in no way an expert at any of this (as I’m sure you can tell).

Many thanks

Posted on May 16, 2020 5:55 AM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,284 points

Posted on May 16, 2020 9:19 AM

In order to perform a clean reinstall of macOS you need to boot into Recovery Mode (Command + R) or Internet Recovery Mode (Command + Option + R). Within Recovery Mode launch Disk Utility. You may need to click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility. Select the physical drive and erase it as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). See this Apple article for details:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

This procedure will erase all data on the drive so I hope you have a backup of your data.

Be prepared to find out the hard drive in the laptop is failing. Upgrading the old hard drive to an SSD will increase performance of the system.

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MacBook Pro not booting up - stuck on updating screen

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