Mavericks install stuck at "about a second remaining"

Don't listen to this guy's advice. I did and ended with no bootable os on my hd.

Me too.

Same here. I wish I would have gone to 'page 2' and read your comment before reacting. Was stuck at 'about a second remaining' for over 2 hours. Here we go with round two...

thomasfromutrecht that's actually bad advice, the install fails when you do that.

Mavericks has been installed for some time now. I too had Thomasfromutrecht's experience the third time I tried to install (just after returning from a chat with a Genius). Don't remember what I touched but it "seemed" to prevent the timeout (which may actuallly be at the Apple server end). Of course it could have been a conicidence and the processing completed.

If you are near an Apple store just do yourself a flav-o-flav and make the genius appointment and bring the machine down and let them install from their diskimage, check your hard drive health and resolve any other issues that may exist on your machine. IT'S FREE!

Wish I had because in the meanwhile I've discovered an old Lacie.scsi kernel extension that I should have removed before installing, and other legacy junk after running etrecheck. Did I mention etrecheck? I did. Step Away from those suction cups!!

I just waited 10 mins and it rebooted. All good now! :-)

After waiting for over an hour I finally started clicking around the screen, using the keyboard to raise and lower screen brightness and volume and a few key presses on delete and function(fn). Was getting keyboard clicks when typing anything on the main keyboard (like input buffer was full or something) but all of that actually got it to go to the next step in about 30 seconds. So, it's worth trying to 'kickstart' the finalization of the process if it's been sitting for a while.

Good luck all!

It did work for me..

cos you're a maniac 👿

Just my two cents...

The first time I tried a clean install:

1. Repartitioned with DiskUtility (after booting to the OSX Mavericks USB stick I created.)
2. Installed OSX.
3. It "froze" at the "about a second remaining." I didn't look at the clock but I know I let it sit for well over 15 minutes.
4. Forced a reboot with power button and left with an unbootable drive.

Second attempt:

1. Booted to OSX Marvericks USB install stick.
2. Launched terminal. Ran the command diskutil zerodisk disk0 to wipe the disk (probably unnecessary, but gives you peace of mind if you have trust issues with the Disk Utility GUI app.) Do this step at your own risk, "zerodisk" is a command, "disk0" is the UNIX identifier of the device (disk) I wanted to wipe and perform a clean install on.--It's much easier to really screw things up using the terminal. E.G. On your system, the drive you want to wipe won't necessarily be disk0.
3. Repartitioned with GUID partition map using Disk Utility app.
4. Installed OSX
5. It got "stuck" again at about a second remaining. Waited a few minutes (likely less than 15,) nothing happened.
6. Clicked the apple and opened startup disk. (OSX Installer window immediately disappeared, but system did not reboot.
7. I did NOT restart manually (via menus or power button.)
8. Closed startup disk window and opened terminal again.
9. Poked around in terminal a bit, looking at du and dir listings of the disk, etc.
10. While I was still poking around, the computer started lagging. After 15 seconds or so it started to reboot itself and the install continued normally!

Did me poking around, causing the installer to go into the background (starting at step 6, second attempt) help things along? Or was I just killing time waiting for it to do it's thing (and I happened not to interrupt the installer by poking at it.) Who knows.

Same here -

(my unit is a late 2009 MBPro 8GB ram (upgraded) 128 SSD (Samsung 830 series) / 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo)

installation from a USB drive, after about 10 min installation progress running ok, hangs 5 min on "about a second remaining"

i switch to Apple menu and click 'Startup disk...'

then i quit it, and i setup the wi-fi, then i open the shell to look around

(after total of 5 min poking around ... ) the thing restarts on its own!

now it shows

.... and about 20 min later - TADA!

good luck to all - this is a nasty bug / hang with OSX

thank you Apple for making me work double for every buck i spend with you (i have an MB Air i don't event want to think about re-installing any time soon 😟)

good luck to all

cheers

-Nick

If waiting does not work, and you are installing from a external (usb) disk, unplug any Ethernet cables, and TURN OFF WiFi.

That fixed it for me 🙂

Thanks Marcotor! That did the trick for me too. Turned off wifi and about 10 seconds later it restarted and is now installing. :-)

Thanks Marcotor! That also worked for me as well. Turned off WIFI, let the Mac sit for about 5 minutes and it finally went to a grey screen, rebooted and continued as expected.

Setup: 2010 MBP 13 2.66 w/ 1tb SSHD + USB Install

My installer hung at about nine minutes remaining when doing a simple update. Hard reset after a couple of hours and the OS would not boot after that. Only option was to reinstall since i didn't have any backups (was a new installation anyway). The clean installation hung at "about one minute remaining" for a few hours and a hard reset was made again. What fixed it for me was skipping the logon part with Apple ID. Without signing in the installation started as it should. Mind you that i did not even reach the installation part the first time, it just got stuck at downloading installation files from Apple, but apparently they wipe stuff before installation process starts and all files are verified. So to sum up... wiped harddrive and skipping logon did the trick for me.