Q: El Capitan update won't boot

Have also been experiencing the same problem. Have had to reinstall 4 times now. Every second or third time I restart the machine following reinstallation, it just gets stuck in the reboot process forever, forcing me to reboot in recovery mode. Disk Utility shows nothing wrong. Now scared of switching the machine off in case I have to waste more time sorting this. El Captain was obviously rushed out before it was ready. Very buggy. On the developers community boards they have been trying to find solutions to this problem of the OS X getting stuck during start up, but their solutions seem too technical and bespoke to be of any use to some of us.

finally, i did a Yosemite installation from the scratch recovering all data...

my thoughts: forget El Capitan, right now it only gives a lot of problems in your device.

waiting for reply from Apple...

Good luck guys

Press CMD + V to boot into verbose mode. U might see the culprit. Most of the time it's an app. Mine happened to be handsoff or some other kext. I deleted it and my Mac booted

Same issue on a late 2011 MBP. Reinstalling ElCap from the recovery partition gets me one boot of usage, but as soon as I restart the progress bar freezes at 0%. I'm pretty discouraged to hear of the amount of people having this issue. I plan on trying Urquhartps's fix tomorrow, but for the moment I am incredibly frustrated and feel like Apple have left us hung out to dry on this one.

Good morning,

Today I started a chat with Apple Support which resulted in a callback from Apple. Nice service. Friendly people out there. Apple-like. That might be the difference between them and others ;-) But the result was a little bit frustrating for our problem: Finally, in my situation the showed me two alternatives: Doing a clean install with manually backing up and restoring my personal data (with the help of Time Machine) or wait for an update of El Capitan - to be announced in the press. This also Apple like - they never show updates directly on their website. They announce it to the public press and we need to track that on our own.

BTW: Did someone ever open a chat with an Apple Technician ? Is that really a human being on the other end or is it a machine responding there ? Well, it was natural speech, even in my language (german), but it sounded somehow generated ...

Cheers

Christian

Not all of us are code literate in that way, sadly. Ironical that we must now learn to be so just because some people who are paid to do this by Apple are not doing their job properly.

Yes, I have the same with my iMac. Also the progress bar stucks at ca 90%. Also after some restarts.

Wat to do?

Hi pietfromhoorn. it looks like you have to do one of these 3 workaround.

1.- go back to Yosemite using backup (if you have one of them) --> Entering in recovery CMD+R meanwhile your MacbookAir is starting.

2.-  copy your essential data, format your HDD  and install a new El Capitan or Yosemite installation from the scratch.

3.- wait for next Apple's release and update for OS El Capitan.

I did second one and finally i got my Macbook Air alives again. Bad news, i lost my programs with installation from the scratch, but at least i can continue working with my laptop.

Good luck buddy

Did you a recovery to Yosemite ? Or do you still have a non-working iMac ?

In the first case - an up and running Yosemite - Apple Support gave me two options: Do a clean installation and restore your data manually or wait for an updated El Capitan

Cheers

Christian

Restart in recovery mode, and reinstall the OS. If your my experience is anything to go by your machine will restart ok after reinstallation. But just don't restart it again, which should be no problem for an iMac but less so for a laptop which one has to carry around across the city.

Dos apple have an ignor button in this time ? many people report problems and apple seems to count his money...frustrating !!!!

We should be so lucky. 5 re-installations later, it still hangs at 100%, and upon manual restart, at about 70%. This on an 8 month old bone-stock Mac Mini.

Verbose mode indicates waiting for DSMOS.

I keep looking for news of this upgrade disaster in any of the mac or osx rags but see nothing except earlier iterations of this issue.

It would be nice for the press or god forbid Apple to take ownership of this mess.

Ross

i have the same problem - installed el capitan already twice via cmd+r

when  restart or shut dow computer - i see only apple logo and empty progress bar.

macbook pro retina late 2012

Never shut down/restart viktor222 until an update arrives - that's inviting trouble! You could try a clean reinstall if you want, it might iron out the problem.