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Cyroceon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 9, 2008
580
100
I have a 2015 MacBook Pro, which was running a previous BETA of Catalina. I updated it to a newly-release Build of Catalina last night and it’s been sitting at Estimating Time Remaining for 12 hrs. I hard restarted (hold Power down for 5 seconds), and I still get the same thing. Any ideas?
 

tethead

macrumors 6502
Apr 13, 2005
405
371
NJ
leave it - mine took around 36 hours to finally update. lots of people had similar issues if you go back and look at the release thread from when b4 came out.
 

Cyroceon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 9, 2008
580
100
Holy hell... appreciate the response, regardless of how much I dislike the answer.
 

tethead

macrumors 6502
Apr 13, 2005
405
371
NJ
yeah i'm really gonna wait to install b5 whenever that hits - don't want another wait like that. first time EVER i've had such an issue.
 

Cyroceon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 9, 2008
580
100
yeah i'm really gonna wait to install b5 whenever that hits - don't want another wait like that. first time EVER i've had such an issue.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't THAT bad, albeit inconvenient. If you have the 10-12 hrs of downtime from the computer, go for it.
 

Flatus McGillicuddy

macrumors newbie
Jul 26, 2018
7
0
I have a 2015 MacBook Pro, which was running a previous BETA of Catalina. I updated it to a newly-release Build of Catalina last night and it’s been sitting at Estimating Time Remaining for 12 hrs. I hard restarted (hold Power down for 5 seconds), and I still get the same thing. Any ideas?
I am installing the release version of Catalina. It’s been sitting there for two hours just like you said on estimated time remaining.I restarted and it’s doing the same thing.
 

Flatus McGillicuddy

macrumors newbie
Jul 26, 2018
7
0
I am installing the release version of Catalina. It’s been sitting there for two hours just like you said on estimated time remaining.I restarted and it’s doing the same thing.
If you restart with command-R held down, you can get reinstall macOS in a menu. From that I was able to start re-installing Mojave. Right now it’s on 35 minutes remaining and we will see if this is successful. I don’t have 36 hours to wait for Catalina. I think this problem may have to do with not installing the final updates to Mojave before initiating install of Catalina.
[automerge]1570584840[/automerge]
 

Mikeymne

macrumors newbie
Oct 15, 2019
2
0
My new (2019) MacBook Pro has been stuck on “Estimated Time Remaining” for over 36 hours now. I’ve lost confidence that it’s working. Is there anything I can do to reverse this process and go back to what I had before starting this upgrade?
 

jpn

Cancelled
Feb 9, 2003
1,854
1,988
My new (2019) MacBook Pro has been stuck on “Estimated Time Remaining” for over 36 hours now. I’ve lost confidence that it’s working. Is there anything I can do to reverse this process and go back to what I had before starting this upgrade?

in the sense of pressing some button and undoing anything while it is virtually frozen, the answer is no you cant do anything.

odds are highly likely that if you just shut down yr MacBook Pro, and then restart, that it will all be ok.
but it really depends on why and where its stalled and that is usually not knowable.

whenever i update to a completely new release (as opposed to a point update) i would imagine that in about 20% of the cases the initial installation stalls.
every time i have just stopped it by shutting down, there has been absolutely no problem.

but, with Catalina, my MacBook Air initial installation stalled during the process (actually it got through the actual OS installation but stalled at the Mail update part).
i needed to shut down. i did.
but sure enough i did end up with Mail related problems.

36 hours is a lifetime to be without a work tool. but i would rather try to deal with problems later then just let it go on and on.
if you have done a backup just before installation, and, you have iCloud syncing. then just about any problem encountered later can be handled.
 

techeddie

macrumors newbie
Oct 17, 2022
1
0
I have a 2015 MacBook Pro, which was running a previous BETA of Catalina. I updated it to a newly-release Build of Catalina last night and it’s been sitting at Estimating Time Remaining for 12 hrs. I hard restarted (hold Power down for 5 seconds), and I still get the same thing. Any ideas?
This is a super late entry but i had same problem. I did the Command R Internet recovery > Disk Utilities > Inserted large external device. Restore the external using the Internal HDD as template. Was able to access the whole drive on another machine using disk utility right click show in finder.
I then Wiped the Internal HDD reinstalled catalina from stratch. Then Imported the documents etc from the external.
Its not perfect but you dont lose the data you had saved (all users accessible)
 
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