Im trying to install Big Sur on my macbook pro mid 2015 and it stuck at "Less than a minute remaining..." for about 2 hours now.. Should I just wait or is there something I can do?! Thanks
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.14
I was having this same problem and I want to share what helped me because I haven’t seen this fix proposed anywhere else. None of the options like turning on/off, using internet Recovery, or MacOS Recovery were working. I turned it on and off again several times and it kept getting stuck on less than a minute remaining. When I finally decided to let it set on that screen and leave it overnight, when I came back in the morning it had an error saying “an error occurred preparing the software update.” Using First Aid from Disk Utility on Recovery also did not fix it.
When I tried to use the option “Reinstall Big Sur” from Recovery it would tell me there was not enough room on the disc to do it. So I was effectively stuck on the install screen.
I called Apple and they were helpful. I was working with them on the phone on a different WiFi than I usually use as I was not at home when I tried calling them. Just to give an idea of what we tried, when I would use Recovery (turn off, turn on, hold command +R or hold command + R + P) and go to “reinstall Big Sur” from there it wouldn’t connect to WiFi and gave me an error that “Keychain ‘System’ cannot be found to store [my wifi username].” We hit cancel to get out of that (don’t choose “reset to defaults” if you get this error or else your keychain passwords on the computer will be deleted; if you save them in iCloud it may not matter if you do).
What ended up working was turning the machine off, then holding Option while it was off, and it came on with a screen to select my Macintosh disc and connect to WiFi. It let me connect to WiFi there. This took me to my desktop login screen and I was able to log in and get back to my regular desktop! Thank goodness.
From there we investigated and turns out I did not have enough space left on my disc to do the Big Sur install— the agent told me it takes 35 gigabytes, and I only had about 33 gig available (checked by going to Apple in top left corner > about this Mac > storage). Luckily I had an old iPhone backup I could delete to free up a lot of space.
The Apple agent told me not to turn my laptop off/restart it, or it would probably put be back onto the install screen. If I have to in the meantime, she said to follow the steps I described as working above to get back to the desktop.
She put notes on my case and I am supposed to call them back once I’m back on my regular home WiFi and we can restart and they will guide me through the reinstall through Recovery. I will update once we’ve attempted that. But for now, luckily my computer is actually working and not stuck on the install screen! I hope this helps someone else who is still having issues where the other proposed solutions aren’t working.
Indeed! Help!!!
I finished wiping out the disk and restoring to factory setup. :(
Lost all my data.
Thank you so much for this! You saved me a lot of time and hassle, judging from some of the other comments here.
I'll add one thing that I found helpful:
You can use Disk Utilities while in Safe Mode to check how much space you have on your boot drive. I kept going back to it to check how much space I was making by deleting files. (You might have to use DU to mount your boot drive before you go through the rest of your process. I'm not sure because that was the first thing I did, to check how much space I needed to make.)
And I'll add a clarification, which helped after I ran into a problem and had to search for a solution:
If rm runs into a character in a filename that it doesn't like, it will return "No such file or directory" and won't delete anything. But enclosing the filename in single quotes solves the problem.
One final note:
After I went through the deletion process and had more than 100GB free on my hard drive, the restarted install process stayed on "Less than a minute remaining" for quite a while still. But I left it alone overnight and the process had completed in the morning. I don't know how long it took -- several hours at least, maybe.
I have a 2015 Macbook Pro running Catalina as well. I had no idea what File Vault even was until I read your post. Apparently I have it enabled and had no idea. Is it only a problem having it enabled for people who didn't have enough space to begin with? The storage tab under 'About This Mac' says I have 221.89 GB free, but I've been too nervous to try updating to Big Sur because even after reading everyone's proposed solutions to problems, I'm still not sure I'd understand what to do to not screw things up further.
I did the same but once I tried to download Big Sur onto my external hardrive it only downloaded until it said "12 minutes remaining" then it just restart the computer.
I figured I didn't disable the security in recovery mode so I did that, tried again and same thing happened only it kept restarting over and over until I held down command R.
Any idea how why its not finishing the download? I really don't want to accidentally crash my computer :(
Just to complicate matters, I have a brand new MB Pro with nothing migrated over, so fully empty hard drive. Roughly 1.8TB of free space. Boss of a computer, in theory.
16inch MB Pro
2.4 i9
32gb memory
5500 gb graphics card
and... 2tb of storage
After driving 2.5 hours to pick up my brand new Pro I excitedly sat in the truck and set up the compute while my gf walked the dog around the dog park. We grabbed food and then drove home. Decided I’d wait to set anything up until I had the new OS installed. Full disclosure I did install Chrome so I could play a 4K video for her.
While we watched a fire burn next to a river the 12 gb download failed out and gave me an error message stating some volume was missing. Bad omen? Maybe. The second attempt finished off without a hitch and the moment I got home I started the update install.
I sit here typing this out on my iPhone. The one minute screen was up for about an hour. I restarted holding option and I was breifly taken to my desktop before the install started itself again. I am now at round two on the one minute screen. Now approaching the 20 minute mark with about a quarter of the progress bar filled.
I read a comment about patience, I will leave it over night and update in the morning.
Big Sur installation stuck at "Less than a minute remaining..."
