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I'm trying to upgrade a Macbook Pro to Yosemite. It downloaded everything just fine, restarted the machine into the installer process. That went just fine until it just stopped.

It's on the "Installing on 'Macintosh HD'" screen with a progressbar sitting at around 60% and says "About 29 minutes remaining". It's been sitting in that same spot for over two hours now.

Does anyone have any advice on what to do at this point?

UPDATE: I ended up holding down the power button to halt the machine, turned it on again, and hoped that it would start okay. It did. :) It just appeared to restart the install process, and everything was fine. It got to the last minute or so and took quite awhile, but it did finish.

Apparently having Homebrew installed, or something else which stores a bunch of files in /usr/local, will cause this last-minute slowdown of the installer. You can either move those files before you install or you can just wait it out during the last minute.

I'm really not sure what caused the installer to halt at the 29 minute mark. But just turning it off/on did not hurt anything.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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As recommended by 0942v8653, Command+L will show you the log and give you a better idea what is going on. In my case, the delay was due to copying of TexLive that had an enormous number of files.

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    After pressing Command+L it takes a while for the installation log to show up. Be patient! Do not interrupt the installer! Wait it out!
    – user110372
    Commented Jan 20, 2015 at 10:21
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I experienced nearly identical symptoms. I got down to 1 minute and it sat there for hours (literally). I am hesitant to advocate following my experience, but here's what I did and it worked:

I moved the mouse to the upper left corner of the screen and found that menus appeared. I selected an option to restart the computer. It appeared to restart the installation, not the download. It took a long time again. It then seemed to hang again, similarly. This time I chose to power off from the menu.

Whenever the machine appeared to hang, I waited a long time to be sure (30 minutes or more), as I did NOT want to interrupt a process just because I couldn't see that which was happening. Eventually, after about 4-6 power off and on cycles, the process seemed to complete, and I'm using that machine now.

FYI, amongst the menu options was one to view the logs, though the information didn't clarify anything for me.

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Do you have a backup?

If so, it’s quite easy to interrupt the install, perhaps look at the logs and either try again after cleaning or just go for an erase install.

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    Just so you know, this post is from 2014. Not a problem that you answered, just thought I’d let you know.
    – Salocor
    Commented Dec 7, 2020 at 2:18
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    Thanks @Salocor ! What you may not see is people are asking for help and those non answers are being deleted so I’m trying to help anyone with this situation. This place has a long, long tail.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Dec 7, 2020 at 2:24

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