Install Problems with Mac OS Mojave

Because I had a good backup of my High Sierra system and had made a Mojave install disk on an external drive, I was able to work around thsee upgrade issues successfully by following the procedure below. Note that this procedure erases your internal hard disk and all of its data, so don’t do it if you don’t have a known good backup (or two) of your old system.

1. Boot into Recovery Mode on the external drive by holding down the Option key at boot up. If you don’t have an external drive it might be possible for you to do so over the internet by holding down Option-Cmd-r when you hear the startup chime.
2. Erase the internal hard drive on the Mac using Disk Utility.
3. Quit Disk Utility and run the Mojave installation by choosing Install macOS, and choose to install onto the newly erased drive.
4. Mojave should successfully install and reboot. This took about an hour for me. When prompted to import data from external source, select not to and continue to boot into Mojave.
5. Set up a new user account for Mojave and continue. I chose not to link my Apple ID in the interests of trying to get into the system more quickly. You now have a clean install of Mojave but none of your data or applications.
6. After logging into the new account, navigate to the Applications > Utilities folder and run Migration Assistant.
7. In Migration Assistant, choose to restore everything EXCEPT the More Files and Folders option (which excludes restoring anything in the root directory that’s not part of a User folder).
8. Wait while your data is copied. This will probably take anywhere from 1 to 8 hours depending on how much data you have and how fast your drives are. I got some messages at the end about incompatible apps, and then the system rebooted successfully into my restored system without all of the massive system slowdown and with full networking and Bluetooth functionality.

This worked for me on my iMac. YMMV. Hope it might help at least some of you who have experienced an unusable system after upgrading to Mojave.

Others on here have reported success after starting in Safe Mode (Shift key at startup chime) to clear caches on the computer that were preventing the installation to progress. One person even reported success after renaming his hard disk(s) without special characters, apostrophes etc.

One thing I would recommend is making a bootable external clone of your existing system, so that reverting can be quick and easy. (Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are two such apps.)

It may be a software conflict that didn't occur with High Sierra.

Posting an EtreCheck report could be helpful.

http://www.etrecheck.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/app/etrecheck/id1423715984?ls=1&mt=12

Also had the same problem. Less than a year old iMac, there should be no issue updating this. However, this is what I experienced.

Boot up took forever, the loading bar would hang, sometimes for five minutes.

Once the login screen appeared, sometimes it told me I had no Bluetooth keyboard connected

When I was able to log in, it was as if there was a 30 second lag between pressing a key, and it registering

Once logged in, the few login items I have seemed to crawl in loading. Eventually, I could look around, but it claimed I had no wifi hardware installed.

SMC, PRAM, Safe Mode, eventually I used the disk repair utility and restored high sierra from time machine.

I don't even want to deal with the headache of a clean install and loading all my files, installing all my apps again.

Maybe I'll just wait till the net Mojave update is out. This is the first major apple fail I've ever had in updating.

Why don't you book an appointment at your nearest Genius Bar? They are quite knowledgeable with hardware issues and the help is free.

Not easily, and not alone.

Started by looking through crash reports in the system log files (via the console app or terminal), discovering which low level process were crashing and why: configd, and a couple of others. Everything seemed to point to it being a network related issue with network limits that were being exceeded.

Another fellow with the issue was inspired and figured out that increasing certain network system limits resolved the problem. I just took that breakthrough one little step further and asked 'But why would some people need to increase these defaults?' - Something was still wrong and it might happen again, so I dug in more.

Every report also seemed to be related to migrations, not new installs, and a suspicious trend of people saying 'I've been using mac for years, and this is the first time I've had a problem' - Which implied it might have been something old, very old, migrated across that was screwing things up for Mojave upgrades.

I compared configuration file dates and what was on newer machines, and realised that those settings were out of date and shouldn't exist at all. The new installs I looked at from at least High Sierra and Mojave no longer included that file (and mine were dated 2013, another I saw was dated from 2008), which implied any settings in it were very old, and overriding those newer defaults in the kernel itself.

I'm experiencing the exact same issues after attempting to upgrade a 2014 iMac with a Fusion drive from High Sierra to Mojave. Tried all the usual troubleshooting steps (resetting SMC, NVRAM, running First Aid in Disk Utility in Recovery Mode, doing a Safe Mode boot, etc). Even tried enabling the networking interfaces from the command line, but no go. It isn't a hardware problem, as the Wi-Fi interface functions just fine in Recovery Mode, and both Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces were working fine yesterday in High Sierra.

Right now, I'm in the middle of trying to do a clean install of Mojave from an external USB drive (rather than an upgrade) and then restoring my files from my High Sierra Time Machine backup into the clean instance of Mojave. We'll see if that works, and I'll report back here if it does. If it doesn't, it looks like I'll be doing a restore back to High Sierra from my backup.

Pretty disappointing that something this major wasn't caught in QA before the OS was released.

I have exactly the same problems and did exactly the same things to fix it.

My perfectly working Mac Pro 6-core (2013) with 32GB RAM is now a useless ashtray.

No clue how to fix the wifi problem. The system now shows "no hardware installed" while the system report shows that the hardware is still working. I tried several things that I found online to fix this. No, not working.

I have no chance to connect my trackpad because Bluetooth found it but will just not connect.

The "Continue" button stays grey after I clicked it. Yes, it says found trackpad but nothing happens.

The same with my Apple mouse.

My 6-core was really fast. Now it's actually unusable.

I cannot even connect to the internet anymore. Just tried it with an Ethernet cable.

System Preferences Network are just now empty.

I cannot add anything.

Oh, after around 4 minutes I see suddenly something and it tells me that my Ethernet cable is not connected while it is.

What am I gonna do now?

Who is responsible for a release like this?

And who will now fix this mess?

I wiped the internal hard drive of my iMac, did a clean install of Mojave, and then restored my data from a High Sierra Time Machine backup (which took a couple of hours). The installation process got that far and the system rebooted itself and wouldn't even get as far as a login screen — just hung in a black screen with a white Apple logo and a white bar about ⅔ full that never moved after about 3 hours of waiting. I'm now giving up, wiping the internal fusion drive again, and downgrading my iMac back to High Sierra using my Time Machine backup. What a waste of time this whole process has been.

It was good to hear from others on this forum (though I'm sorry no one has a solution). I'm sure many others outside of this forum must be experiencing similar issues — people reporting stuff on this forum are usually just the tip of the iceberg.

I just hope you all have a Time Machine backup or that you remembered to clone your High Sierra install before trying to install the steaming pile of you-know-what that is Mojave.

Pretty awful QA job on this, Apple. Upgrading the OS onto a supported machine shouldn't render it unusable.

I don't think we are able to solve this at the moment.

After trying all things I could find online, e.g. about not working WiFi cards after installing Mojave, deleting Network Preference files, etc. - It just doesn't work.

I'm pretty sure that this is not a software conflict (with some old incompatible software) after restarting in Safe Mode and having exactly the same problems.

There is no Wifi and no Ethernet connection. Very sluggish behavior. I also could not identify a single process (that we could fix easily ) responsible for the mess.

The main thing for me is that Network System Preferences need minutes to show up - in regular and Safe mode. Then there is no chance to activate the WiFi card or getting even the Ethernet connection to work.

I do have a REGULAR Mac from Apple and did not change any hardware. So it also cannot be a hardware problem because of added components.

3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5

32 GB Memory 1866 MHz DD3

2 x AMD Firepro D300

512 HDD

APPLE - please fix this soon!! It's so extremely frustrating that your QA department did obviously a lousy job.

Just for general info:

These are user to user forums where volunteers try to help other users. Apple is not present here.

If you wish to address Apple, you will need to do so via the Contact Support link in the upper right corner of the page.

And, Mojave has been tested by hundreds of testers for several months. However, that does not (and cannot) encompass any/all/every possible configuration millions of users may have. So, problems do occurr. I have had Mojave installed and there have been no problems at all (except for some quite old apps which are no longer compatible or supported). I upgraded directly from Sierra.

I agree and disagree.

If you are a hardware/software manufacturer you have to find a way that your recent hardware is still running after an upgrade. I agree that not all software can, should and will but that's not the case here.

This is obviously a problem of regular Apple hardware with regular Apple software.

Also I don't like to report to a help desk (support) when those guys there have no chance to fix this, which is obvious after many users did exactly try this to no avail with the same problems we all have. I do not spend hours on the phone when there is no clear solution for a standard problem.

I also upgraded one MacBook Pro to Mojave which is running fine but my Mac Pro is now actually completely useless.

There is no excuse as long as it is standard hardware with standard software from the same company!

I've had the same issues. I have installed Mojave 3 times, spent a lot of time with Apple support, ended up restoring High Sierra from Time Machine each time. I've been using and updating OSs since the Mac Plus without problems; this is a disaster. I can't think of anything that is on my 1-year-old iMac that isn't from the App Store or a reputable software house, and my only external devices are a LaCie 4TB HDD and my Internet modem.

(I'm not an expert, but I get this feeling that there may be conflicts with old 32-bit stuff that is hanging around. Maybe there should have been some kind of a pre-install sweep to corral that stuff. Anyway, QC at Apple has become a continuing problem.)

From what I've read here Mac Pros are particularly susceptible to problems when upgrading to Mojave. Haven't see a one size fits all fix for the problem. You might do a Google search for "Mac Pro and Mojave" and see what you get.