Big Sur taking forever to install. Not sure what’s wrong.

I’m installing Big Sur on my 2015 MacBook Air but the status bar below the Apple logo on the black screen has been stuck at 35ish % (it doesn’t show progress in percent) for over an hour now. Prior to that it was moving quite quickly and blew through about 5 different status bars. Though downloading the files took less than 10 minutes. Not sure what’s happening. Anyone else experiencing this? For me it an update has never taken this long.
  • Same here, still working after 7 hours of updating

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After talking with an Apple senior advisor I was informed to simply restart the computer. He said there was an issue with the progress bar not completing therefore not continuing the process of restarting the Mac. After I shut down the Mac and restarted it with the power button it instantly came on and allowed me to login with the update already installed!
  • After 7 hours of upgrade, I did what you said here and did not work!! so now i do not what ii will hapen. snif snif

  • It took over four hours to create a bootable USB and then to install Big Sur on an external HD... When I tried to bootup from the external, it took another three hours to migrate information from the internal HD to the external. I have been unable to boot up my Macbook into Big Sur from the external and have given up in utter frustration. Now I'm thinking of selling my Macbook Pro 16 and purchase a cheap PC and install Linux on it so I have a laptop and OS that works!

    C'mon Apple - let's get thing rolling again, huh?

  • Having the same problem with it stuck on 90% and not progressing further. Tried restarting twice and it hasnt had any affect

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After talking with an Apple senior advisor I was informed to simply restart the computer. He said there was an issue with the progress bar not completing therefore not continuing the process of restarting the Mac. After I shut down the Mac and restarted it with the power button it instantly came on and allowed me to login with the update already installed!
  • After 7 hours of upgrade, I did what you said here and did not work!! so now i do not what ii will hapen. snif snif

  • It took over four hours to create a bootable USB and then to install Big Sur on an external HD... When I tried to bootup from the external, it took another three hours to migrate information from the internal HD to the external. I have been unable to boot up my Macbook into Big Sur from the external and have given up in utter frustration. Now I'm thinking of selling my Macbook Pro 16 and purchase a cheap PC and install Linux on it so I have a laptop and OS that works!

    C'mon Apple - let's get thing rolling again, huh?

  • Having the same problem with it stuck on 90% and not progressing further. Tried restarting twice and it hasnt had any affect

I am having this problem right now. I started the installment last night around 10pm, and I woke up now at 9am and it is still installing. I’m worried I did something wrong, this is a brand new computer.
I have a 6-month old i9 MacBook Pro... thus far in installing Big Sur, it has shut down & not reset without warning, went through some weird process upon restart, & is now taking forever to install. You would think that Apple wouldn’t use customers as the beta launch 🤦‍♂️
This should be seamless. We’ve become too complacent with Apple. They’re turning into Microsoft.
Just bought a new top of the line iMac and it freezes on installation of Big Sur... was on the phone for about an hour with Apple care till I lost them and couldn’t reconnect, didn’t help with the problem. What’s going on here is this a common problem ? Anyone know how to fix this issue? Looking for help, thinking about returning the computer...
I’ve been staring at ‘23 minutes remaining’ for about 6 hours now. The last 3 OS upgrades (which I now dread more than death) have basically gone the same way. Weeks of lost pay. Weeks of being on the phone with apple support. Looks like it’s happening again, for the 3rd time in 2 years. Weeks of lost pay, and the stress has probably taken years off of my life span
Wow, 6 hours? That's cute. I'm on day 3 trying to get my M1 to boot for the first time. It's new, out of the box, literally never used it. I feel like a total chump for buying this thing. I could do a fresh install of windows in the 90s in a matter of minutes. Now today, apparently 13 hours to install macos, is considered acceptable.

To start i'm a music produce since 6 years and i bot my Imac 4 years ago and use it for my production. I don't have a TM backup because my external drive, 1TB, is permanently rejected by the mac i don#t know for what reason. Image if i loose all my data !!! This will be my last Apple computer and will go back to Windows as they don't have this mountain of issues when they release a "new SAFE OS update" ...!!!

i'm trying since one week to have a successful installation of macOS Big Sur 11.4 on my Imac late 2015 with Intel i5 processor and 1TB HDD. According to Apple my mac should be ready for the new OS. Since months i have an error while trying to download the update. And since one week i had different error:

First: "An error occurred while installing the selected updates macos big sur" ..then "An error occurred applying the software update in macos big sur" ..then "An error occurred preparing the software update" .. and since yesterday when i reboot(normal start) the mac i have a black screen with a prohibition sign. and this is what it means: "A prohibitory symbol, which looks like a circle with a line or slash through it, means that your startup disk contains a Mac operating system, but it's not a version or build of macOS that your Mac can use." !!

i tried everything i could find on support.apple.com ... Safe mode couldn't start, it an endless loop till release the Shift key.. reset SMC and NVRAM/PRAM .. Diagnostics gave error PPM002 but i can see my disks on the terminal and in Disk Utility. DiskUtility says disks are OK .. i did the Internet recovery many times (opt+cmd+r and shit+opt+cmd+r), but it ends with same error after hours (error applying the software update). It shows me at the beginning 2 hours and 19 minutes left than it goes up .. one time 29 hours .. than 35 hours .. and today it went up to 50 hours .. and i know it will end with the same error .. i reinstalled big sur on external drive with 1TB, ended also with error.

But since yesterday my file system changed. It is not like in Catalina .. i can see it using Terminal in recovery mode. but my user folder is gone. My Macintosh HD still showing 169 GB but when i check the file system with terminal i see empty files ... Users/ contains only Shared/ folder ... Users/ is now in /system/Volume/Data/Users. If i'm not wrong, before it was in /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/MyUser/. I have also two Volumes, a Macintosh HD (with 57 KB used) and Macintosh HD - Data (with 162 GB used).

For today i will make a bootable USB with macOS 11.4 and try to boot from external drive .. i saw that people did it without losing data .. then i want to try the Target Disc Mode and therefore i have to buy a thunderbolt 3 cable and bring my imac to a friend's place that has Big Sur working ... else i will try a Catalina downgrade and go buy me PC.

My worst experience with a system update.

  • ... 24 hours later ...i turned of the WiFi and did tow times Internet recovery using Internet Cable .. no success :/ .. first time error "an error occurred loading the update" .. and second time error -2106F and the globe with a triangle and exclamation mark in it... A new challenge :'o

  • .. i made a bootable USB with macOS Big Sur 11.4 installer .. Started my Imac with 'option' key pressed, choose my USB as startVolume and the boot went well .. I reached the recovery mode to install a new copy of macOS 11.4 .. i started the installation but at minute 13 an error showed up "error occurred loading the update" .. So i disabled the SIP (System Integrity Protection) and restarted the boot .. new error: "Installation cannot processed because the installer is damaged" ... than i tried the Internet recovery .. nothing, still give me Big Sur that i cannot install .. but what i can see now is that my file system looks again like before the update and i can see my user again, and when i try to continue with the installation it tells me that my HDD is broken and i have to deleted!! ...Never .. My life is in this Volume ;) ... Today i tried Internet recovery by pressing cmd+opt+shift+R and for the first time it gave me "OS X El Capitan" the OS that was purchased with my Imac from 2015 :/ .. i was happy that i finally find a solution ... but ... it doesn't show me any Volume !!! I when i check with Terminal i see a blank 1T volume .. First didn't help ... i think to avoid to delete my data, my next and only option is to downgrade to macOS Catalina .. i have already a bootable USB for it, but i have to make more investigation .. the disappointment is getting bigger !!!

  • Have you solved the problem? I have the same issue

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..

Started to an update for Big Sur on my office computer -- iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) -- over 4 hours ago, which stopped at the 35% mark. I restarted the computer nearly 2 hours ago, and it's stuck at the same mark.

What should I do? It's completely shut down work.

  • Hi! I'm having the same problem. Were you able to resolve it?

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Just disconnect the network until you see error in update window. Then connect to network again and start upgrade again. You will observe download start form beginning but progress bar will move quickly to last download point and continue from there.