Yesterday I updated my os on my MacBook Pro (late 2014) to El Capitan. Today, upon starting up my Mac, I am stuck in boot up. It doesn't even begin to boot. What can I do to get my Mac to boot without losing all of my info saved on my computer?

Startup your Mac holding down the Command + R keys.

From there you should be able to access the built in utilities to verify and repair the disk if necessary and restore OS X using OS X Recovery.

"losing all of my info saved on my computer"

If you are successful and can boot your Mac normally after using OS X Recovery, make sure to backup your important data.

Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac.

That way if you have problems again, if you need to restore OS X, you can restore from a backup using Time Machine in OS X Recovery.

I've been having this problem. No solution yet.

Apple Support had me do this.

1. Clear PRAM

2. Boot in Safe Mode (Hold the shift key down when booting)

3. Back up using time machine.

4. Boot in Recovery Mode and erase the drive.

5. Install El Capitan

I did this and El Capitan allowed me to set up the computer, but I still can't boot normally. I can boot in Safe Mode, but it hangs up about 70% through the process of a normal boot.

I am having the same issue. After typing in my password it remains on the same screen with the gear turning. Please post a solution if you find one. Thanks!

I'm having the same issue on my 2013 imac. I reinstalled el capitan twice and still will not boot up. I have gone back to Yosemite and it boots up fine.

I am experiencing same/similar problems. MPB Gray Screen on first Restart after El Capitan

To get into recovery mode, power-off, wait over 10 seconds, power on and immediately press and hold Command-R. Keep holding until apple logo and progress bar appear.

I can get it running after reinstalling El Capitan.... but can't reboot afterward. Going to use a time machine backup from before El Capitan to get back to Yosemite.

I had the same problem and found that a corrupted or old .kext file in the Volumes/Mac HD/Library/Extensions folder was corrupted or not compliant.

1. I booted into safe mode by holding "shift" down after the chime. El Capitan booted and I was able to log in. It runs very slow in safe mode.

2. I opened the extensions folder volumes/Mac HD/Library/Extension

3. I created a "off line" folder in the Extension folder and copied all the .kext files into the folder

4. Deleted all the .kext files (it copies them into the "off line" folder

5. Restarted. El Capitan then booted very quickly.

6. Added on .kext file at a time and restarted each time till I found the bad .kext file. That file was deleted for good.

7. Put all the good .kext files back in the correct place, delete the "off line" folder

8. Reboot

Hi Orion,

I have the almost the same issue, were you able to resolve it? I brought my macbook to an authorize service provider here but repairs would take a lot of time (there's no apple store here yet) so I'm trying to figure out a way to fix it. If you were able to resolve this please update us. Thank you!

The problem is that some third party kernal extension (kext) files are incompatible with El Capitan.

Step 1: Get a verbose debug to identify the problematic kext. Hold down Command-V when rebooting, or Command-S for single-user mode. Look for the kernel panic stack trace, and find the kext causing it. In my case it was SyncMate

Step 2: Get to a terminal prompt. One way to get to the terminal is in Recovery Mode (hold down Command-R after powering on). Go to utilities, terminal.

Step 3: Hit Google with the name of your problematic kext, along with "el capitan boot" as keywords, and find the command to remove it. Many posts are on apple developer forum, use the cached view instead of logging in. In my case the command was

rm -R System/Library/Extensions/Eltima*

Step 4: Reboot. All is well.

Alternate version:

Step 1: Reinstall OS X. It works the first time.

Step 2: Type kextstat -l | grep -v com.apple

Step 3: Find where all those are in either /System/Library/Extensions, or in /Library/Extensions

Step 4: temporarily move ALL to another folder

Step 5: reboot. On success, begin moving them back one at a time from the temp folders. Repeat until you've identified and removed the bad ones.

Thanks Orion521, good thing it worked for you. Unfortunately, single-user mode and verbose mode can't run/doesn't work for my macbook because it can't detect my internal HD (it can detect external HD when i tried installing one) Though i can access the Terminal from recovery mode Cmd+R

hi dbdiwwis,

is there any way/command i can use to see the texts written on verbose mode thru the Terminal?

@jiafey, unfortunately verbose, or single user, is the way to get the system to start up and crash in a way that you can see what is causing the crash. In recovery mode, you're not really starting up, so you have to guess at which kext is causing the problem.

The good news is we know of a few problem ones to delete, and you can move ALL of them to a temp folder long enough to troubleshoot.

While in recovery mode, navigate to System/Library/Extensions and look at all your third party extensions there.

There are a few known problem ones: SyncMate (or anything by Eltima), Virtualbox are ones I'm aware of. Move those extensions to a temporary folder.

Try to reboot. If successful, delete that temp folder. If not, repeat the above but move ALL the third party extensions out, reboot, then move them back one by one (or half at a time if you like binary search!) until you find problematic one(s).