macOS 11.1 update hanging

Your hardware and software is fine. I would make sure you have all external devices unplugged, hold the power button until the computer turns off, then wait 10 seconds and turn it back on. I am not sure, but I do believe when that the hang is a hang during OS install, is due to doing checking out for errors before installing. When you restart by theory, that should resolve it. If restarting doesn't work, turn the laptop off, wait ten seconds and then restart while holding down Command-Option/Alt-R keys which will put you in recovery mode and boot the computer from the internet. Once booted from the internet, use Disk Utility to repair the disk. DO NOT ERASE, just repair, then restart and see if the install will finish.

In the end I contacted Apple support and followed their advice to back my machine up, then wipe the hard drive and reinstall MacOS. That worked and now Big Sur is there and working just fine.

My only words of warning are that it takes a long time (a few hours) and make sure you know your password for your Time Machine back up.

What finally worked for me was booting into Safe Mode.

Safe mode boots your computer with only the basic operating system, no other application/extension, etc will load.

To boot into safe mode, press and hold the shift key (I used the left shift key, but I assume any of them will work), when you are starting up your computer, after the computer boots, you will see a message in red text that says safe mode ( in the menu bar, to the right).

Once I had booted into safe mode, I simply opened system preferences and did the software update as usual. It was taking a long time and was at 10% as had been before, so I cancelled and did everything again. (Boot into safe mode and do the update again). The second time I just left it there and after the 10%, it went to 5%, so I just left it there and eventually it completed the process. At that point it went thru the normal process of rebooting and doing the install.

As I mentioned before, I'm not sure if the solution was booting into safe mode or just simple coincidence that after many attempts, it finally worked.

I was tempted to do a clean install, but got lazy and didn't want to reinstall all software and migrate data from my TimeMachine backup.

I truly hope booting into safe mode will work for you.

Good luck!

George

Boot in safe mode and try to run the update. It will take some time at 10% and 5 %. Be patient...it will lead to reboot message and rest of the process is same.

P.s. This I am suggesting after trying all the methods mentioned in this thread. Good luck!

I was able to do the upgrade by accessing it from the app store. I had tried doing the upgrade for a couple of weeks by clicking on the notice I got when I booted. It took about 30 minutes but went flawlessly.

Booting in safe mode worked perfectly, thank you all.

What worked for me on my iMac (2019) was to load Big Sure 11.1 from app store....took 48 minutes

No, simply do a repair disk, after completed restart the computer and the install should continue with no issues

Restart definitely did not help. The upgrade got stuck in the same place saying it was preparing(10 min estimate). So I used command option r. Boot from internet took 8 mins. Then I got to menu where can run disk utility. I don’t see a repair but ‘first aid’ which ran on base. Was ok. From there restart. But 11.1 not installed. Will try without external drives. Help.

By Big Sure recovery download, do you mean you reinstalled the macOS?

Yes, that's correct, MacOS was reinstalled during the recovery process, including the 11.1 update.

No such luck for me. I even did the boot into recovery twice. The second time, I ran the repair disk on everything, no errors at all.

after restart, install still hangs once it gets to 10 min remaining on preparing. I left it there to see if it ends at some point

I continue with my problems. I still can't update. I've entered into recovery mode 3 times. Each time, after I enter recovery mode, I run disk utility and run FirstAid on every volume there is; the disk itself, the hd data volume, an update volume.

I do not get any errors.

After I restart, I get the notification of the 11.1 update, I click to proceed and after the download, it still gets stuck at 10 mins left on preparing.

If I open Activity Monitor, the process com.softwareupdate is consuming over 100% cpu, fans are running high.

I'm stuck and don't know what else to do.

I have this problem with both my MacBook Pro Intel 2020 and iMac 2019. Both download, stop at 15 minutes remaining, and after a few minutes I get the error unable to download. Very frustrating, first time I've had any problems with a MacOS update.....

I have exactly the same problem as described in the question above, and have followed this advice. I repaired all of the drives in recovery mode, and restarted - but the download is still getting stuck at '10 minutes remaining'. I have a 13" MacBook Air, which is less than a month old.

Any tips for what to try next?