Progress Bar Stuck on 100% on boot High Sierra

I also have this problem. Started on December 17th (yesterday). I chatted and talked on the phone with Apple support and all the efforts didn’t resolve the problem. It took 4 hours to reinstall High Siera and it went back to the same progress bar. Left it on over night still no log in page. I don’t have the time back up so I don’t know what’s going to happen now. I have three years of art work on my hard drive. The only suspicious things I saw on my Mac in the last month or so was a warning about a virus. I restarted my computer and it was fine after. I paid it no mind because I was always told macs don’t get viruses. This is also my first Mac. I’m going to a Genius Bar soon and hope they have a solution. I can’t afford to get a new Mac so I need this fixed and hopefully I can get my art works back. I’m really upset about this.

Hey there.

i've did the steps and first aid, it loaded pretty fast and after that i did a reboot again.

Still the same issue not bring me to login screen.

If there anything else i need to do in recovery mode? I'm quite careful with doing anything at the moment just in case i mess up the system.

Awaiting for your prompt respond.

Try booting into single user mode, then mount your boot drive (commands to do so is shown), change to boot drive & run fsck. It may help.

i think a new description for this problem is needed “Apple Death Smile”😢

it certianly is causing major problems😠😠 for those afflicted

I went to an Apple Store and they could not save my files. They restored it to its original OS and then I had to bring it home an install the new OS. Its a two day process, upgrading to High Sierra takes about 19 hours. My computer has been working like the day I bought it. Only thing is I lost all my files that were on my desktop. So now I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to retrieve those files. The tech at the store said there's a way to get them but I would have to go to another tech place. Also, The Apple Store didn't charge me anything because OS related issues are free of charge.

This is so upsetting. I can feel your pain... I have yet to try to transfer my files to an external HD and not even sure if that’s a possibility. Unfortunately, I don’t have an Apple store nearby either. This is such a hassle for something we cannot Control.

I encountered something similar after a system update on 10.12.6 (Sierra, not High Sierra). The symptoms were the same, however, booting to 100% progress bar, then never completing.

I had two backups, one Time Machine and the other a SuperDuper clone.

After booting into Recovery and re-installing the OS but with the same problem, I then ERASED the boot disk entirely and reinstalled a fresh, clean OS. I then, on first boot, migrated everything from the Time Machine backup. The problem returned!

I then theorized that some kext or some other installed extension had caused the problem, so I had maybe just migrated the problem back to the new clean system.

I then repeated the erase and fresh install, but this time on first initial boot, I skipped EVERYTHING except to create one admin user account, nothing else. Then I applied all available system updates, including the one that led to the problem. Rebooting after that worked fine. I thus had a plain vanilla system with one admin user, no user files, and nothing installed except Apple original software.

Then I used Migration Assistant to migrate ONLY user accounts and user files, no settings and no applications. Then I proceeded to reinstall only some applications from scratch, such as MS-Office, Adobe Lightroom, TurboTax, and a few others, but not everything from before. After a week or so, everything seems ok.

Not sure this will resolve your issue in High Sierra, but if it is caused by something installed or a bad kext or some similar thing, the clean install followed by Migration of only user accounts and user files prevents that corruption from being brought over. The downside is reinstalling all one's software, but I found that to be fairly straightforward and not very time consuming in fact.

Both external SSD drives with clean-installed High Sierra (MacOS 10.13.2; installed with USB installer which was created on Jan 10, 2018) boot fine as external drives in my MBP13 (early 2011). But it seems to take forever to shutdown.

After one of this bootable SSD drives was input as an internal drive, the progress bar stuck on 100% on booting, and login window never shows. With the external-drive booted, run First Aid at Disk Utility for the internal volume, resulting to be OK, and as mounted when exit the Disk Utility. But, the internal disk does not show at Startup Disk of System Preferences.

What could be wrong? Any suggestions or clues will be appreciated

I had the same problem I tried everything so the only way I found is to reinstall Mac and delete everything in the HD as I didn’t have any backup. The only I had to solve was how to keep my files. I saw in the recovery mode “more infos” section based on safari and used this to login to my mas storage ( in my case fritzbox mas storage) http interface and I tranfer successfuly all my files to hd I connected on it! Is a way if you don’t have backup . You can always use iCloud or google drive too but with limited space and it’s very slow.

This post now has more than 8K views. Another post about slow booting in High Sierra has more than 15K. Do we seriously have no guidance yet from Apple on this problem?

For me this has been an intermittent problem for perhaps two months. I am about ready to throw my 2012 Mini through a window if it doesn't stop sticking on the boot progress bar (sometimes at 100%, other times less). I have to force shutdown because of this several times a week. Usually, on the second try it succeeds. In a variation of this glitch, I will notice the mouse pointer flickering in the upper left corner of the black screen, telling me the boot actually is done. I move the mouse and voilà, the login screen appears.

Yes, I have booted into recovery mode and run first aid a number of times. Never seems to find anything wrong.

P.S. another stellar example of why I *will not* give up my Power Mac G5 (dual core 2.0), on which this post was written and sent.

A read of the various posts shows that there are different things that can cause this, as some people have resolved their issues and others have not.

Basically there are two possibilities: software and hardware.

Simply reinstalling the OS has in some cases apparently fixed the issue, but for others it has not. That could be because the user has previously installed something that prevents booting (a simple reinstall of the OS does not erase extensions and other software the user has installed), or because there is a hardware problem.

One way to isolate this: backup all files, then erase and install the Mac OS and just one admin user, don't migrate any software, settings, or extensions over. Then use the computer for a while, with many restarts, if the issues go away, then you have proven that a totally clean, vanilla system does not suffer from the problem -- the issue probably is with something that had been installed that is incompatible for the OS. If the problem persists, then you may have an intermittent hardware problem, which requires a different type of troubleshooting. The original poster had a 2012 Mac with this -- that's a 6-year old computer. Now I have a 2008 iMac that is still doing just fine, but people in the industry will tell you that some of the parts are not specc-ed to last that long. Also, the original poster had added memory within a few weeks of posting, it is possible something was unintentionally touched inside the unit during that process that now is making intermittent contact.

Been on Apple Support again.

They took me through an attempt to reinstall OS using Internet Recovery. As the OS available on Internet Recovery was Lion, it wouldn't do it as a newer OS was installed. Good job it didn't work too, as I have now learnt that despite the advisor confirming to me three times that there would be no data loss, it actually would have completely wiped all data.

Apple needs to get a grip on this - it's absolutely no way to treat customers.

I am helping somebody with this issue and here is what I have found...

First I tried repairing the superblock, that said it worked, but same problem stuck at 100%. I then backed up all data manually over a day and then wiped entire HD and downloaded a new installer and re-installed High Sierra. It installed, loaded to desktop, I rebooted and first reboot, stuck at 100%. Personally, I don't use Mac OS, and after this fiascle, plus them being found out for intentionally slowing down old iphones, makes me wonder if they are intentionally causing this issue too. I have NEVER in my life seen a brand new formatted disk with fresh installed OS failed to reboot immediately. 0 Updates, no changes whatsoever. I am very disappointed in mac products and won't be encouraging them to anybody I know.

Here is a log of repairing the SuperBlock via a LiveISO:

Welcome - Parted Magic (Linux 4.6.3-pmagic64)

root@PartedMagic:~# df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

devtmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev

tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm

tmpfs 3.9G 312M 3.6G 8% /run

/dev/loop252 57M 57M 0 100% /run/br_fu

/dev/loop253 25M 25M 0 100% /run/br_m

/dev/loop254 310M 310M 0 100% /run/br_sqfs

tmpfs 3.9G 960K 3.9G 1% /run/br_ram

aufs 3.9G 960K 3.9G 1% /

tmpfs 3.9G 8.0K 3.9G 1% /tmp

root@PartedMagic:~# blkid

/dev/loop252: TYPE="squashfs"

/dev/loop253: TYPE="squashfs"

/dev/loop254: TYPE="squashfs"

/dev/sda1: LABEL="EFI" UUID="2860-11F4" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI system partition" PARTUUID="00007cfa-0bc4-0000-bb5f-0000c55c0000"

/dev/sda2: UUID="1b157782-e82b-3af2-b883-8c4e148f75f3" LABEL="Macintosh HD" TYPE="hfsplus" PARTLABEL="Macintosh HD" PARTUUID="00004d0b-0f7e-0000-0472-0000c2610000"

/dev/sda3: UUID="87d689d5-cec6-3ddb-af02-172cf83b1242" LABEL="Recovery HD" TYPE="hfsplus" PARTLABEL="Recovery HD" PARTUUID="f0c892a9-5c98-44df-81bb-718cd90e78ab"

/dev/sdb1: LABEL="PARTED MAGI" UUID="1B1B-0C49" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="0e3a6f32-01"

root@PartedMagic:~# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/local/

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2,

missing codepage or helper program, or other error

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg | tail or so.

root@PartedMagic:~# dmesg | tail

[ 49.356203] usb 3-2: reset high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd

[ 49.520429] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 UNKNOWN(0x2003) Result: hostbyte=0x07 driverbyte=0x08

[ 49.520439] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 Sense Key : 0x5 [current]

[ 49.520444] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 ASC=0x20 ASCQ=0x0

[ 49.520452] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 CDB: opcode=0x85 85 06 20 00 05 00 fe 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 ef 00

[ 125.105353] hfsplus: write access to a journaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only.

[ 133.793658] hfsplus: invalid secondary volume header

[ 133.793665] hfsplus: unable to find HFS+ superblock

[ 173.451955] hfsplus: invalid secondary volume header

[ 173.451961] hfsplus: unable to find HFS+ superblock

root@PartedMagic:~# fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sda2

** /dev/sda2

** Checking HFS Plus volume.

** Checking Extents Overflow file.

** Checking Catalog file.

** Checking multi-linked files.

** Checking Catalog hierarchy.

** Checking Extended Attributes file.

** Checking volume bitmap.

** Checking volume information.

Volume Header needs minor repair

** Repairing volume.

** Rechecking volume.

** Checking HFS Plus volume.

** Checking Extents Overflow file.

** Checking Catalog file.

** Checking multi-linked files.

** Checking Catalog hierarchy.

** Checking Extended Attributes file.

** Checking volume bitmap.

** Checking volume information.

Volume Header needs minor repair

(2, 0)

** Repairing volume.

** Rechecking volume.

** Checking HFS Plus volume.

** Checking Extents Overflow file.

** Checking Catalog file.

** Checking multi-linked files.

** Checking Catalog hierarchy.

** Checking Extended Attributes file.

** Checking volume bitmap.

** Checking volume information.

** The volume Macintosh HD was repaired successfully.

Just happened to me :(

And i haven’t back up my portfolios yet

Most of methods mentioned here are not working

I was working on my latest porfolio and i’m not ready to lose my files especially my portfolios, layouts, and everything😭

Really need help!

Please apple do something!

You should be able to recover files via a LiveISO, I doubt this is Hardware related, its software, which means your files are OK, just the OS is Borked. Mine did reboot after rebooting another time after fresh install, so going to try it again, with all personal files on a separate partition incase I need to downgrade OS.

FreeSoftwareServers wrote:

I have NEVER in my life seen a brand new formatted disk with fresh installed OS failed to reboot immediately. 0 Updates, no changes whatsoever.

I have -- this happens when there is a hardware issue, possibly with the disk itself, or with the disk drive interface, or with other electronics inside the Mac. Having a perfect fresh new OS installed or running Disk Utility or Unix tools to repair the file system will not fix a hardware issue.