Monterey update taking a very long time; what should I do now?

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Monterey update taking a very long time; what should I do now?

I started an update to Monterey on my mid-2015 Macbook Pro about 14 hours ago. Early on, I didn't realize that updates were supposed to take more than an hour. After an hour the screen said "less than a minute left" and stayed there for 30 minutes, so I tried a force power-off and restart. The installation seemed to resume. I resolved to leave it alone for a while.

Now, after I got up in the morning, 13 hours after starting the install, there was a progress meter about 1/3 of the way across the bar. After about 30 minutes the Mac rebooted itself and the progress meter quickly crawled to 1/3 of the way across the bar and stopped again.

I need my Mac for work, and if I really messed it up, the sooner I give up and can restore the drive from my full backup, the better. How long should I wait?
Even if I can get it to install, because I have an older Mac am I taking a risk of future problems in this early release of Monterey? Maybe this is another good reason to abandon the install, restore the drive and try again with Big Sur.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.12

Posted on Dec 5, 2021 12:06 PM

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Answer 1

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Old Toad

Level 10

207,697 points

Dec 5, 2021 4:11 PM in response to mike1127

You might try the following: 1 - Boot into the Recovery volume (boot with the Command + R keys held down), launch Disk Utility and run First Aid on all volumes; 2 - if that fails then boot again into Recovery volume and reinstall the system.

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Answer 2

PRP_53

Level 10

85,105 points

Dec 5, 2021 1:45 PM in response to mike1127

If one is upgrading from MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.12 which is Sierra - there is going to be a lot of work it is doing. Not least of all is, probably installing an EFI BOOT ROM so it is able to understand the Drive conversion from HFS Journaled to the new APFS Drive format.

Should FileVault be involved too - hopefully the drive had finished Decrypting before the Monterey upgrade was applied.

As to how long before the machine will be useful to you - do not know for sure

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Answer 3

mike1127 Author

Level 1

13 points

Dec 5, 2021 3:59 PM in response to mike1127

thanks for your reply. Oops, I hadn't updated my profile recently. I was actually upgrading from Mojave.

Also it seems that it got to the point where it could boot into safe mode. It hangs on a normal boot. So yes, I can boot into safe mode but there are two problems: extremely slow (like 20 seconds to respond to each button press or mouse click) and it seems to be trying to set up a new computer... no hint that it knows there is an existing user or data.

(I do have everything backed up

Do you know why it would be slow now and whether it's still possible to get it to boot into Monterey with my existing user and data?

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Monterey update taking a very long time; what should I do now?

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