High Sierra install slow

I hope you have good external backup of your original system, at least Time Machine, if not a bootable clone as well.

Try powering off and a normal restart. If this fails, try starting in the Recovery Partition (RP) and run some disk First Aid checks from the Disk Utility. You can also make other recovery attempts from Time Machine and Internet Recovery options.

Note that the High Sierra install can have a long period of dark screen while the disk is formatted, followed by a long install of half an hour or more.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/ht201314

Called Apple tech support and was told the machine was frozen and to power cycle it. After restarting, the install began, took about 45 minutes, but was successful and machine is back up. Not a completely painless install, but at least I didn't have to do anything drastic.

One thing: I'm not sure how they are able to change the file system format non-destructively, but somehow they are, as all of my files were intact, yet the system now reports that the disk is an APFS volume. What is the difference between the older HFS+ and the new APFS?

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro with 8gb / 2.9mhz and the High Sierra upgrade just finished after 14 hours. Be patient and it will get there in the end. Machine actually running faster and better now that the upgrade is complete.

Do keep in mind that the reason it takes so long this time is because during the High Sierra upgrade the disk is formatted to use the new Apple File System (AFS). This is quite unique, and isn't usually the case with macOS upgrades. Personally never had to wait longer than an hour an a half to upgrade previous versions.

I have installed High Sierra on 3 Macs so far and have seen

a roughly 45 minute installation time. All three did have SSDs

though.

15 hours an counting on PowerMac from 2010. It's probably the same silly mistake Apple made in previous upgrade scenarios. The problem was reported several times, but in some areas, Apple is no less incompetent as many other vendors. The Mac OS X upgrade procedure is one of them.

I am in the process of trying to upgrade my new MacBook Pro to 10.13.1 from 10.12.6 (2017, 2.9 GHz, 16GB, 512GB SSD). I have also been seeing a dark screen with a spinning cursor from the initial restart to do the upgrade. No error messages, no progress indication, just a spinning cursor on a dark screen. It has been this way for over an hour. How long should I wait before trying a reboot, and if I do reboot, can I expect the install to continue automatically? What is the best procedure to follow?

All of my files are backed up, but I do not have a Time Machine backup, thus if the disk is hosed I will have to do a clean install and then reload my files.

After the 23 minute download, and despite the installer ensuring that it would be a 40 minute installation, it actually took 70 minutes. Flawless installation though.

My new installation has taken over 6 hours.

How much longer should I persist?