Progress Bar Stuck on 100% on boot High Sierra

Perhaps your used to this, but as a OS independent person, this is horrible. I have diagnosed the problem to the 10.13.2 update.I can get MacOS Sierra to boot, but as soon as I update, it is a boot loop. Simple Solution to a person who helps ppl with mac. ATM stay on Sierra.

WOW, Thank you! I started mine in Safe Mode (boot with shift) and after a few minute wait it actually booted, then used the steps listed here, restarted and the system booted in normal mode. Thank you, such an easy fix!

I'm glad it worked for you McTann and hope it continues to. Unfortunately I'm on here again today because I thought I should mention that after about 7 consecutive good starts, my Mini (2012) choked on the boot progress bar again this morning. Twice. The second time I was trying to boot in safe mode, which it seems unable to do these days (perhaps because its dirty old M7803 keyboard doesn't work all that well by now, or the Mini doesn't like it, but I doubt those theories). For reasons beyond me, when I lost patience, let the shift key go, and pressed/held the power button, it restarted instead of simply shutting down, and the third time was the charm. Running fine now. I will try MacGallant's trick again—perhaps it serves to clean something up that will repeatedly get dirty while running under High Sierra. Frustrating to say the least. As Sejonmusic said, erase and recovery shouldn't be the only option for an OS glitch. (No, we don't *have* to erase, we can try the simple reinstall from recovery mode first, but even that's risky and extreme in my opinion.)

In any event, i you have an older unit look at the specs on High Sierra. The upgraded items, at least to me, are not close to worth the trouble I went through. The new file system? When you're in lock screen it hardly matters.

What is interesting to me is that even though the progress bar is stuck at 100%, I can go to another Mac in the house and use Screen Sharing to find the frozen Mac login screen. In other words, the Mac is fully booted but literally stuck at the progress bar. I can interact with the remote Mac e.g. check email, use a browser but when I physically go back to it, its still stuck on the 100% progress bar. I have found that re-booting via Screen Sharing will get the Mac to fully boot on the second attempt. A hard shutdown/restart from the culprit Mac does not seem to help.

For the record I have a late 2017 iMac so for those who believe this issue is caused by their Mac's being too old (as advised by Apple), I wouldn't agree. If Apple allows High Sierra to be installed, it should work and leave it to the end user to decide if the potential slower experience outweighs the benefits of the newer OS. Although this issue doesn't help the cause to upgrade.

This issue most often occurred when I was booting back into MacOS from Boot Camp. As a rule of thumb, I enable either Screen Sharing or Remote Management on all installations. So to answer the question, if you haven't already enabled Screen Sharing on a Mac stuck at 100% progress bar, I am not aware of a way to enable Screen Sharing on that Mac via command line, from a remote Mac. From a security perspective I would be surprised if this is possible even if File Sharing was also already enabled. I have not Googled it.

I can confirm this approach works and I had the same problem as everyone else with High Sierra (also, it wasn't just the one kext issue, it was multiple different ones each time I restored which was a bit weird).

This was the only way I could get anything back without repeating the same issue yet again.

I ended up reinstalling High Sierra about 6 times with multiple different settings and restores but to no avail. I eventually did exactly as steve626 describes and am still currently reinstating my software.

So far so good.

There is only one clincher...now my Command-R boot into Recovery mode hangs at 100% load screen and goes no further. Oh, the irony...

😐

Hello, I have also experienced this very frustrating problem. I have tried all the steps mentioned in this thread multiple times. The only thing that worked was to restore a Time Machine backup to a previous OS version number.

I have a 2011 IMac, if this issue is due to the fact my machine is relatively old then Apple need to be advising users. I’m just happy we had a recent backup to avoid losing the 15k+ photos we have on there.

I hope that you get a satisfactory resolution to your issue.

I'm so glad I found this post because after trying a hundred other fixes this is what worked for me. Took my Mac from home to my work where the crashed iMac was. Got a Thunderbolt cable and my "Stuck" iMac's HD showed up right on the desktop of my other iMac. I had a lot of files backed up but there was quite a bit that was not. I just dragged everything over to an external HD I had plugged in and recovered everything I needed. I then restored the stuck iMac with a Time Machine backup from a year and a half ago, at least I didn't have to reinstall everything.

This helped me tremendously, except I could not get in using Safe Mode (progress bar stuck at 100%). Instead I used Recovery Mode (Command + R), then Disk Utilities. I clicked on First Aid to check the system. Report was OK. Then I proceeded with "Erase", and then to use Time Machine to get back to where I was.

I too downloaded MalwareByte but the scan was clear. Avast scan was also clear. Funnily enough, the reason that prompted me to attempt to reboot the system [inadvertently getting caught in the 100% progress bar issue] was that I noticed that my system suddenly became extremely sluggish and slow. It was like you described, as if a virus was using up nearly all of the RAM. But the virus scanners could not detect it.

So now I'm left like the OP - petrified of rebooting the computer as I could not identify the exact issue.

Has Apple or the community found out the issue?

If you don't know what FileVault is, you're very likely not using it, so it's not a factor. If the commands are entered in Terminal EXACTLY as presented, you won't get error messages that no such file exists. If you're as inexperienced as you seem to be, you should seek help from someone with more Mac experience. Having two sets of eyes, and two brains, working on a problem such as this is usually a good thing. This is pretty high-level troubleshooting, and not for everyone. (If you took the instructions to an Apple Store, or to the local Mac computer shop, or to an experienced friend, they could help you accomplish this fix in just a few minutes.) Good luck!

After reinstalling Mac OS(high sierra), It got fix for me.

Same problem as above mention in first Post except I dont have Time Machine. Because I am new with mac. I have Mac Mini 2014

I'm having the same issue with my 2013 iMac.

Starting in save mode does not work and the hardware test does not show any anomalities.

Thank you for any help.