hello.. hopefully someone here can provide some insight or help to get me outa this unholy conundrum that os x installers have bulldozed me into :/ heres where im at.. im installing OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 on a fresh/clean SSD (meaning wiped and formatted as hfs+) on a MacBook Pro 8,2 (early 2011) using a live usb installer using image downloaded from app store. there are no words of any kind i can string together to adequately explaine what a nightmare this has been --and continues to be. smashcut. took about 2 full days for the installer to complete phase 1, which it then proceeded to reboot and initiate the setup process. unfortunately I was away from my comp when this happened, away just long enough for the system to sleep--or hibernate, if you will. after awakening the lid-ajar laptop ..both the keyboard & the trackpad have become 100% non-responsive. having one USB 2.0 port available, i was able to utilize a wireless mouse to regain control of the curser. this has not been a sufficient appendage to complete the installation due to REQUIRED alphanumeric entry at the user-creation-stage.. i even tried to copy some text prior to arriving at this stage, to then paste in whatever fields needed without success ---c'mon that was a tiny bit clever anyway :] ---- this brings us to where im at as we type.. in the present moment ive rebooted (hard shutdown, yikes) back to the live install USB to repair permissions on the target drive. my only other thoughts are to figure out how to bring up an on screen keyboard when back to the target drive installation interface ¿? or if i can find a usb keyboard, maybe tag team that open port w/ the wireless mouse¿? my main concern is that the install not be jeopardized as i cannot aford to start the 46 hour install all over again. any thoughts, experience, direction, insight, suggestions, or help is deeply appreciated and thank you kindly ahead of time!!
no keyboard during yosemite install
Hi. It's not going well is it!
Now there's no way installing 10.10.3 should take even 2 hours, let alone 2 days. The fact that it did, and that you've now got the issue you do, strongly suggests to me that it is corrupted and not worth keeping. Even if you get a bit further with the user-creation stage, it's very likely that you'll continue to be plagued with problems.
I'm afraid re-installing is your best option (but it shouldn't take anything close to 46hrs)
Do you have access to another Mac or another OS X on an external drive? Does it boot into recovery (hold cmd+r for 10 seconds just after you power on)?.
man i sure hope not.. when doing some research prior to my post..i found many cases of others having ridiculous Yosemite install times, but maybe these areas are thought to be remedialed by 10.10.3 whereas all those reports were doing its inaugural release..? @Max108 ..there are a couple uncommon factors i ought to point out that could have attributed to the extensive install time: [1] the target drive is a 480GB SSD residing in the bay that once belonged to the stock optical drive. therefore data transfer rates could be inferior to the intended HD sata connection. [2] keep in mind the incompetents of the 2011 15"MBP's processing power....weighing in at a cute little 2Ghz. undoubtedly pale in comparison to the cell phone im typing this on (..sorry for the typos!) which runs at 2.5Ghz,..sigh. now as for reversionary tactics.. i have nothing. for the most part, anyway. b/c my main drive has a broken 10.11 rev1 halfway upgraded to the second release ( ¡! a whole nother nightmare in itself¡! ) and of course, the yosemite install thumb drive
oh and as far as the ability to reboot to recovery.. most definitely. one fortunate aspect to this situation is that i have rEFInd installed :] so i can effortlessly load any of the partitions
Yes, a lot of that could be pertinent. I now better understand your ferverent hope that you can get the 10.10.3 install working. Do any working Recovery HD partitions appear when you boot holding alt/option? never mind: I just read your most recent post 🙂
Are prepared to ditch the abortive 10.11 update (although it occurs to me that rescuing data from it is why you're trying to get 10.10.3 up and going on a second drive)?
Basically, what is your hoped for end-configuration? 10.10.3 on your main drive and 10.11 DP2 on the attached SSD?
What version(s) of RecoveryHD can you boot into? Also, I'm assuming that simply booting into the 10.10.3 partition is resulting in the same keyboard/trackpad non-responsiveness.?.
There's much that can be done from Terminal after booting into Recovery HD, and there should be repair install options available to you (i.e preserves your user data) so I'm sure there's a solution...
exactly! very nice logical reasoning skills..you now know my underlying intentions behind this mess. :] im installing the stable 10.10.3 on the secondary drive so that i may retrieve the data from the 10.11 atrocity. this is an immensely strategic approach for several reasons. the majority of my main apps bust in 10.11 and its wayy too buggy to be my main OS. so ive already been desperately lookkng for a way to revert back down to Yosemite without having a timemachine backup. Another is that id long planned to eventually shove my ever-decreasingly-liked os x instance onto the secondary drive..and thrive in a linux build as my main playgrounds so i think if i can complete the install successfully (for once maybe) ill be essentially-free from apple's constraining ways && be one happy geek :]
this is good to hear! thank you for taking the time to help out @Max108 , this means alot to me. correct, booting the 480gb drive brings me to the top setup screen with both of the input variances still unrecognized. d'you think resetting the NVRAM would have any effect?
and im adequately comfortable with the CLI and would love to throw some weight around in terminal if you have ideas
It's definitely worth trying the NVRAM and SMC (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295) resets first and, for what it's worth, if you're faced with the same non-responsiveness after rebooting, the chances are that it wouldn't have made any difference if you'd been there before it hibernated
The fact that you can launch rEFIt demonstrates that the input problem is software not hardware. We could use Terminal to extract the kexts from the install package and relace those in the faulty install but, as I alluded to above, that's almost always only the tip of the iceberg and trying to patch OS X can cause other complications that, in short, make it much preferable to do a clean install.
Modifying the installer to work without checks can potentially be done from within Terminal, but having a working OS would make the process a whole lot easier.
If an SMC reset doesn't do the trick with the input devices, I think your best course of action might be:
- Boot into Recovery and use Terminal for the much more straightforward process of copying the important stuff from the 10.11 partition over to your attached SSD.
- Then use Disk Utility to erase the main drive (actually I'm still not clear which version of Recovery you have access to, and hence which drive it's on - would need to know before continuing to map out...)
Firstly, to answer your last question >> I can choose all recovery instances that exist which includes the Recovery HD on the maiin drive (10.11), the Recovery HD on the secondary drive (10.10.3), and still the Yosemite Installer USB. So far I've booted into each of these options individually to use the diskutility and verified/repaired the filesystem & permissions on the secondary drive (10.10.3).. but was failed to repair the main drive (10.11) ---which is already known to me, but i don't believe I gave you any detail on why it was garbage.
After repairing the secondary drive, I've gone ahead and rebooted the Yosemite Installer USB and begun installing on the secondary drive. Figured might as well while I wait to conspire a game-plan on here. On the optimistic side.. the installation appears to be performing at a much more reasonable rate than the last time! ..(tho, not that it's quick by any stretch of the imagination)
moving onward, I as well am sure there's some way to solve this issue..and am ready to get the options mapped out. now if my memory serves me correctly, I do recall something you mentioned about a possible workaround for the "can't install because newer version already exists" obstacle..? 😀
Glad to hear that the install is proceeding quicker - that's encouraging. If the fresh install works then you're sorted; you can save what you need and completely erase the main drive in preparation for your linux build.
I remembered reading an article by Rod Smith, the rEFInd guy, about a conflict between rEFInd and Yosemite and I was wondering if it may have been the cause of (or contributed to) the abortive install(s). I haven't used rEFInd since it was rEFIt, so I don't really feel "up" on it. Anyway, here is the article (I'm avoiding full links because posts with external links have to be moderated, which has been taking as much as ten days):
rodsbooks.com/refind/yosemite.html
The workaround for the "can't install because newer version already exists" obstacle was what I was referring to when I wrote "Modifying the installer to work without checks can potentially be done from within Terminal, but having a working OS would make the process a whole lot easier". It's essentially a variation on what I've done before following the guide here:
macissues.com/2015/01/28/how-to-force-os-x-10-10-2-to-install-on-your-mac/
Actually, now that I've had a chance to read Rod's article properly, I doubt rEFInd is the culprit. To be on the safe side, if you're by your computer when it reboots after the main install - the bit it's still doing now perhaps - then you could bypass it by holding alt/option to start Apple's native bootloader and selecting the new 10.10.3 partition.
ohh yea refind is definitely an innocent bystander here. haha, in fact. I've always noticed that every os x update bypasses the refind efi by default. so like in the case of when the 10.10.3 install reboots--and even the 10.11...etc.--i don't think it actually does a "full reboot" ya know? like if paying attention..the hardware itself doesn't seem to be shutoff-then-back-on-again..just the software....(i know in the android world this is considered a "hot boot") ...thus, just going right into the native apple efi.