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Boot up after installing El Capitan

HI,

I've got stuck with white screen with Apple logo and empty progress bar underneath after installation of El Capitan. Booting up in safe mode gives the same result. I've made schoolboy error- trusted and did not back up system with time machine. Any help highly appreciated. Thank you.

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 1, 2015 4:10 PM

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Posted on Oct 2, 2015 4:32 AM

Boot OS X Recovery by holding and r (two fingers) while you start your Mac. Choose "Reinstall Mac OS X". That ought to reinstall El Cap and not your previously installed OS. See how far you get.

99 replies

Oct 27, 2015 4:33 PM in response to akwarner

Um no I don't think so - the previous clean install I did - I clean installed El Capitan to a formatted drive. And it rebooted fine. Then I migrated just my account and data. NO APPS. And when I tested the reboot - it failed again.


So anecdotally it is either my account settings or data maybe? Or it could be the hardware drivers?? Don't know - I have the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro (the first Retina model) - the Core i7 with 16 GB RAM. Not sure if anyone else has had similar issues with this particular model.


El Capitan seems to install fine and run fine and reboot at least once - but whether I restore everything or just my account and data - it just won't boot again. Does migrating only your account and data also migrate app settings??


Anyway - not going to stress anymore. Sticking with Yosemite and maybe next year's OSX update will allow a successful upgrade without all this fluffing around. Just as the previous two updates did.

Oct 27, 2015 6:24 PM in response to NickTsiotinos

I Had this problems a month ago. Following is what I did and worked for me.


PLEASE read it all before touch any key.


I did the following procedure starting in Recovery mode:

Part 0:

Under Utilities menu, open terminal an do:

NOTE: You must be carefull about the real drive name.

Watch out: CHANGE THE VOLUME NAME TO YOURS –

IP: This is not a work of mine. I found it in an apple forum.

Part 1 of 2:

cd /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/Library/Extensions/; mkdir Unsupported ; mv Net* Unsupported ; mv Sym* Unsupported ; mv hp* Unsupported ; mv ndc* Unsupported ; cd /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/System/Library/Extensions/ ; mkdir Unsupported ; mv Belc* Unsupported ; mv Eltima* Unsupported ; mv hp* Unsupported ; mv Hua* Unsupported ; mv Netg* Unsupported ; mv Remo* Unsupported ; mv RIM* Unsupported ; mv USBEx* Unsupported ;

Part 2 of 2:

rm -Rf /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/Library/Filesystems/*fuse* ; rm -Rf /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/Library/Application\ Support/Sym* ; rm -Rf /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/var/folders/*

You must be carefull about the real drive name.

Watch out: CHANGE THE VOLUME NAME TO YOURS –

IP: This is not a work of mine. I found it in an apple forum.

Oct 28, 2015 3:20 AM in response to Ales De Large

Good morning.

No, it was not a clean install. Was a normal one.

My machine is a mid 2009 macbook Pro. 8 g ram 1T hd


for for the name go to apple menu, system info, and there you will find it.


PLease, give me some hours , and I will post as complete as I can.

everything deserves te effort. My machine is working at least 25% faster than before

I use databases, simulation software, a lot of math sw ms office and native pages numbers keynote A Lot

Oct 28, 2015 5:15 AM in response to Ales De Large

Good morning again.


Please!!! read it all before pressing a single key.


I did an upgrade over Yosemite. I usually keep up to date my OS.

My machine is a mid-2009 macbook pro. 8GB Ram, 1TB HDD.


You must be careful about the real drive name.

Watch out: CHANGE THE VOLUME NAME TO YOURS –

Intellectual Property: This is not a work of mine. I found it in an apple forum.


My whole procedure was as follows:


Turn off.

Start my machine in recovery mode (command-option-r pressed while machine is starting)

On the Recovery mode menu bar (top of the screen) there is the Utilities menu. There inside is the Terminal. Open it.


Now:

Type ls /Volumes (-l from line, large, long-) the result (next row) is your HD name.

-Mine is "Mac Disk OSX2" because i did change two years ago my HD by myself. As command line does not recognize spaces, if your HD name has some, you must add the back slash (\) character before each space.


Then follow the instructions sent before, by typing -do not forget the semicolon-. The last command doesn't have it:


cd /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/Library/Extensions/;

mkdir Unsupported;

mv Net* Unsupported;

mv Sym* Unsupported;

mv hp* Unsupported;

mv ndc* Unsupported;

cd /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/System/Library/Extensions/;

mkdir Unsupported;

mv Belc* Unsupported;

mv Eltima* Unsupported;

mv hp* Unsupported;

mv Hua* Unsupported;

mv Netg* Unsupported;

mv Remo* Unsupported;

mv RIM* Unsupported;

mv USBEx* Unsupported;


rm -Rf /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/Library/Filesystems/*fuse*;

rm -Rf /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/Library/Application\ Support/Sym*;

rm -Rf /Volumes/Mac\ Disk\ OSX2/var/folders/*


You must wait few minutes until it finishes, and then without doing anything else (anything) restart.


As I said before. It worked for me. Latter I had some issues with wifi. Already solved in apple forums.

As I mentioned earlier, my old machine now works great (better than when it was new).

I did not a clean install, just an upgrade.


I hope this can help you.

(sorry for my english -not my native language-)

Oct 28, 2015 6:42 AM in response to Carlos Soto

Had the same problem upon upgrading to El Capitan. On reboot, the progress bar got up to around the 90%, then, got stuck. I posted about it, here:


First Boot-Up Into El Capitan "Got Stuck"


Performing an SMC reset allowed me to boot up. I, then, ran the terminal command I posted in the thread to generate a list of kexts installed on my system. I weeded out the ones listed as "not signed". I've been booting up, fine, ever since.

Oct 28, 2015 10:54 AM in response to Cerebro

Unbelivable! This worked for me! I could boot several times recently and it seems to be solved. We'll see how it is tomorrow but it looks great so far. It even seems to boot faster than before. I really got comfortable with franciscofrombaltimore's idea which also includes a big clean up but yours worked quickly and smoothly. But I think I still have to think about cleaning projects though.


I still had to click away about a hundred reports of wrongly installed .kext-files, this always comes up in relation with Little Snitch, but I think that's another old story.


Thank you so much!!!

Oct 29, 2015 1:22 AM in response to Cerebro

That link about how to determine which kext files are unsigned is BRILLIANT . Thanks! It is by far the simplest solution.

Now the bad news is it does not help those who like me were having the startup problem after installing el capitan CLEAN on an EMPTY formated Disc, even before migrating all the old apps and docs ....!!!!! That version of the problem was only resolved by following Apple Care's advice of first reinstalling your mac's ORIGINAL OS version after booting up from internet recovery . Then installing el capitan over that, rather than installing it clean. THat is because apparently the clean install version of the installer has a bug and it is safest installing over an older , basic system becaus eof that bug.


Conclusion: do both things!!!!!! But do the kext thing first as it is really easy and simple and fast, and might be enough for you, while the other thing takes forever (downloading the old os, installing it, downloading el capitan again, installing it, and them migrating all your files which can take 24 hours if you are doing it with a time capsule over wifi.......)


Finally, my big complaint after all this is : why when using migration assistant, do unsigned kexts get copied to the new system anyway.? Once you install anew system, when migrating data from an old computer it should not migrate those useless and potentially lethal kexts since you no longer have the corresponding apps.. .....

Oct 29, 2015 5:52 AM in response to franciscofrombaltimore

Yes indeed this should not happen. What a total disaster of an update.

Finally the getting rid of the KTEXT unsigned files got me going as well.


My tale of woe:

- tried a direct update - no reboot.

- reinstalled the OS - no reboot.

- reverted to Yosemite time machine backup.

- Tried totally clean install and migrate all data and apps - no reboot.

- reverted to Yosemite time machine backup.

- tried clean install only data and account settings migrated - no apps - no reboot.

- tried clean install of original OS (Lion) - update El Capitan - migrated everything - no reboot.

- tried to revert to Yosemite time machine backup (twice) - no reboot (twice).

- reinstalled OS from recovery - El Capitan - followed the link showing how to find unsigned ktexts and delete.

FINALLY REBOOT IN EL CAPITAN. ALL DATA AND APPS INTACT.


I agree that this should not happen - with the enormous resources available to Apple - they surely should be able to get this right.


Thanks everyone that takes part in these forums - good outcome.

Boot up after installing El Capitan

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