Internet recovery disk install says 10 hours

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Internet recovery disk install says 10 hours

I have a 16 inch 2019 Macbook Pro and I'm currently doing a clean install via recovery over the internet*. After connecting to my wifi and taking about half an hour to download everything, I got through to recovery and told it to install Sonoma on the disk. The installation wizard is now running, but it estimates approx. 10 hours for the installation to finish. Surely this isn't normal?

I imagine it downloaded the OS image in that 30 minutes? Or was that just the recovery wizard and now it's downloading the actual OS?

(*on attempting an OS reinstall I accidentally wiped the entire disk, and hadn't used the startup security utility to enable installation from external storage before this, so now I have to do an install over the internet)

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 14.6

Posted on Sep 28, 2024 3:53 AM

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HWTech

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Sep 28, 2024 11:01 AM in response to luciferous_a

If it took over half an hour just to boot into Internet Recovery Mode, then you have a really slow network or Internet connection so it will indeed take a long time to download 14GB of installer files...you only downloaded a very small amount to reach the utilities screen in recovery mode (probably only about 3GB).

It is also possible that Apple's servers are still being a bit overwhelmed since the recent release of macOS 15 Sequoia and iOS 18.

Also, those time estimates are usually completely off base. I have seen those estimates drop after a short while. I have also the time remaining stay at 1 minute for more than 20 minutes even on the second phase of the install process where only the SSD is involved.

Since you are booting & connecting with Internet Recovery Mode, you can try doing so at another location especially with a different ISP to eliminate that as the bottle neck. You can also try a DFU firmware Restore to see if that can help:

How to revive or restore Mac firmware - Apple Support

I guess another consideration is why you were performing a clean install? That same reason may be why you are encountering problems with reinstalling macOS. I do know that power related issues can severely hamper system performance on these USB-C Macs. I also know that the Logic Boards on the MBPro 16" (2019) model also have an extremely high rate of failure compared to other models.

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