Big Sur installation stuck at "Less than a minute remaining..."

Hey there! If the HD is locked, you may have to first unlock it:

While in Disk Utility, click on “Macintosh HD - Data” (Usually), Click File > Mount, then enter your admin password. If this is the case, then afterwards, you should be able to run the commands.

Likewise, if you aren’t able to, and need to erase the drive, and don’t have a backup, but ARE able to mount the volume, AND have an external hard drive you can utilize, you can also use Terminal to save the data before erasing the drive.

Let me know how it goes. But I believe for the most part, with these symptoms, pressing the power button for 10 seconds, then turning it on again fixes it, but I think this thread has a host of different issues/symptoms that require different resolution paths.

Thanks so much for posting this. In my case — and I was having the same problem as everyone else here — big sur installed after I upgraded my iCloud to 2TB. I’m not sure why this got me past the one minute remaining screen after a long afternoon of dread. It might be because my MacBook Pro is in that mode where it tries to save everything in the cloud, and the upgrade, plus the fact I could connect to wifi using some of the tips elsewhere on this thread, meant it could clear enough space for big sur. I “only” had 33gb free when I tried to install, and assume that that was the problem.

I don’t see why Apple can’t prevent people from attempting to install big sur if they don’t have enough space. This problem is so preventable.

Patience Pays Off! I was stuck on this Less than a minute remaining screen Forever! But after shutting down my computer and going through the same old, I paid attention to a post here that said, just keep waiting. I did and now everything works swimmingly! Now, if I could just figure out how to get rid of the constant whirring sound from my new MacBook Pro, I would be a happy camper. BTW, from conference with Apple to final victory - 10 hours. Still, happy that everything works the way it should

We had a similar problems in old MacBook Pro's, got stuck there at 1 minute remaining for few hours, few devices we left it overnight and it got completed, couple of them we tried hard rebooting and it helped, if you are even struck after that, better to take it to nearby Authorized Apple Centre, we being a mobile app development company can't afford such delays during our productive hours, apple has to resolve these glitches, common this is 2021, but still there are these lame issues.

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Chennai

I got it to work finally. Just took a lot of tries. Finally booted the internet recovery partition, installed Yosemite, logged in, downloaded Big Sur, installed that, logged in, restored from backup. Took three days and lots of reboots.

I had the same issue with my MacBook Air and was stuck in an endless cycle. I wanted to try the suggestion to download Big Sur to an external drive, and open up space on my laptop, but I lost the cords for my drive, and with a current lockdown couldn’t replace them quickly. I had never backed up to an external drive, since this is a secondary computer. After much distress, I decided to look on iCloud. All my documents were saved. So, I erased the hard drive and re-installed Sierra. I was able to recover all my files from iCloud.

After many attempts and much gnashing of teeth, I shut down. Restarted and held down Command + r for a short time. That allowed me to access Time Machine and restore prior settings. Two Observations: If YouTube could tell me this, why couldn't Apple? And NEVER even look at Big Sur again.

Just when I thought it was stuck forever on less than a minute remaining and started searching for solutions online, it to reboot. So may be a little patience works sometime. It was stuck for ten minutes or so.

If you go back to the main recovery start up screen click the download Big Sur option and then select your external hard drive as the destination. It takes about 40 minutes to download it to the hard drive and then it will automatically restart the computer and begin the install I think I started mine at like 3 AM and went to bed then at 8:30am I skeptically clicked to wake up the Mac expecting to see the recovery screen again and but saw the set up screen instead! So I’m not sure exactly how long it took but under 5.5 hours.

Doing the set up is a little confusing because I think you’re kind of setting up the hard drive as a computer essentially. I was able to delete a folder I know I had a back up of that was about 96 gigs to free up space and that was located in HD data and I think Volumes. It was tough like the OP said to navigate around but I searched a file name and once I saw that file name at the very bottom of the finder screen I could click on the folder and bring up files that way.

good luck!

Did you remove the Macintosh volume? Or unmount it? You might try installing the OS on an external drive, boot from that, mount, save the data, however if the previous step wasn’t able to get it mounted/unlocked, the same may happen there.

After nearly 12 hours onto apple support. 3 different text chat agents and two call support agents, i had to erase my mac and re install big sur. Absolute nightmare.

You likely have to mount the drive in disk utility in the recovery partition prior to going into terminal.

Also stuck on "less than a minute remaining ..." In my attempt to update to big Sur.

I have been rebooting all day. Have left it in this state for anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 hours and it doesn't ever get past the "less than an minute0 stateZ Computer won't boot up in safe mode either. Gets caught in a reboot loop when I try and never boots past the apple with about a 30% progress bar.

WHAT DO I DO? This has been a deeply documented issue with Big Sur updates. what is the solution apple?????

I also have this issue. Stuck on “less than one minute” for hours. Reboot only leads me back to the install process which then gets stuck again. Booting into safe mode doesn’t work either, goes into a loop as described before. Managed to boot into recovery mode, tried reinstalling Big Sur from there, install process too over an hour and... got stuck at “less than a minute remaining”. This is my work machine, I’m a remote worker, I rely on my equipment. Only reason I even attempted the upgrade was because Docker was kept asking me to.

After 15 years of MBP ownership and loyally sticking with Apple and OSX I’m at the end of my rope, company ain’t what it used to be. This is a very serious issue for the users that have and this thread has no meaningful response, just your standard help desk “have you tried rebooting”.

Expecting to get some sort of official reply here.

I’m having the same issue! It started with “less than one minute screen” and now it’s stuck on a loop between apple logo screen and password screen. Reboot won’t work. Safe mode won’t work. I’ve tried several times! This is what I use for work!!! What should I do?