Big Sur Upgrade Diaster

[oldmacs]

How long should I leave a Big Sur installation going when the progress bar has frozen - I'm at about 2 hours in and at some unknown point the progress froze on the apple symbol and progress bar (no time shown)?

2017 iMac 27 Inch with 2TB Fusion drive (coming from Mojave 10.14.6)



I'm beyond frustrated. I keep my parents and family's Macs at least one major version behind to avoid bugs etc. So Ive had 4 Macs happily running Mojave since when Catalina came out in 2019. Updated my sister's 2015 MacBook Pro with no issues. Then it came to my Mum's 2017 MacBook Air and brother's 2014 MacBook Pro. I downloaded the update on the 2017 air and moved it by USB onto my brother's laptop as the Big Sur update is so bloated and takes hours on end to download. Mum's 2017 Air froze exactly like Dad's iMac is now. I let it go 6 hours before force shutting it off, only to find it wouldn't boot at all, and no troubleshooting would revive it. My brother's MacBook Pro got to the end then brought up a weird screen showing an upgrade progress I'd never seen before, and froze on this for 4 hours. I pulled power at that point and it started back up like no update had been done, so I started the update again. 4 hours later and the same result, so I re-downloaded Big Sur, and then it did the same thing that Mum's then now Dad's Macs have done (freeze at the same point).

How could Apple's upgrade process be this bad so many months in? In all my years of going IT support, doing MacOS upgrades going back to Tiger I haven't seen anything this bad. I wish Apple would drop the stupid yearly MacOS updates and go back to two yearly to bring back stability.

 

[jz0309]

Shouldn’t take that long, when I upgraded from Mojave to Big Sur about 2 months ago, iMac, it took about 1.25-1.5 hrs total, internal 1TB SSD though… I’m assuming you were running APFS already?
But before forcing a reboot I’d give it another hour…

 

[oldmacs]

Shouldn’t take that long, when I upgraded from Mojave to Big Sur about 2 months ago, iMac, it took about 1.25-1.5 hrs total, internal 1TB SSD though… I’m assuming you were running APFS already?
But before forcing a reboot I’d give it another hour…

Yeah already on APFS. Will give it another hour. I'm absolutely dreading having to do another clean installation.

For reference, this is the progress bar below:

 

[jz0309]

Yeah already on APFS. Will give it another hour. I'm absolutely dreading having to do another clean installation.

For reference, this is the progress bar below:

View attachment 1824920

Oh, almost done, definitely wait…
Do you not have a backup to revert back to Mojave?

 

[oldmacs]

Oh, almost done, definitely wait…
Do you not have a backup to revert back to Mojave?

Everything is manually backed up (Drag and drop to external HDD) as I've had a whole heap of time machine issues. Have a WD MyCloud which decided to stop automatically backing up about 2 months ago. Couldn't get the Mac to recognise the previous time machine backup, and so started a new one. Gave up 5 days in when it still had 1tb of data to back up. Then tried a new time machine backup to a USB drive, and it quit backing up about 5-6 times, requiring it to be manually restarted then hours upon hours of 'preparing backup'. I gave up and just did a manual backup.

Dunno what Apple did to time machine but I had similar issues across the other 3 machines as well (involving multiple different HDDs), so all of them ended up just getting manually backed up.

 

[Honza1]

Do not have Big Sur experience, but prior versions sometimes took excessively long also. Depends on what is being moved where and how. It is not very efficient moving. And if this is moving stuff located on spinning drive, it can take multiple hours. I recall once it took my system over night, surely more than 4 hours after which I gave up and went to bed.

Note on upgrade and dead macs. Upgrades put high strain on the system and this causes marginally working systems to fail. Often disks will fail when forced to read/write ton of data quickly, memory issues will pop up, graphic cards may get loaded more and fail... This has been discussed here many times. We can argue if that should be, but it is life. One can decide if to risk upgrading, but systems without any hardware issues will not fail upgrades. So it is in some way "fitness test" for each system.

 

[Honza1]

Everything is manually backed up (Drag and drop to external HDD) as I've had a whole heap of time machine issues. Have a WD MyCloud which decided to stop automatically backing up about 2 months ago. Couldn't get the Mac to recognise the previous time machine backup, and so started a new one. Gave up 5 days in when it still had 1tb of data to back up. Then tried a new time machine backup to a USB drive, and it quit backing up about 5-6 times, requiring it to be manually restarted then hours upon hours of 'preparing backup'. I gave up and just did a manual backup.

Dunno what Apple did to time machine but I had similar issues across the other 3 machines as well (involving multiple different HDDs), so all of them ended up just getting manually backed up.

Time machine usually works fine, but some drives are known to have issues with Time Machine. I had most luck with no-brand USB enclosures/docks and regular internal cheap desktop hard drives. I have all of my Macs backed up with TMs on - each its own and different - combination enclosure/HD and except for occasional drive or enclosure dying (which is expected, nothing lives forever), all systems are backing up correctly all the time. I recall reading here that WD drives were more problem prone than others for TM use, but I do not have my own experience.

 

[oldmacs]

Note on upgrade and dead macs. Upgrades put high strain on the system and this causes marginally working systems to fail. Often disks will fail when forced to read/write ton of data quickly, memory issues will pop up, graphic cards may get loaded more and fail... This has been discussed here many times. We can argue if that should be, but it is life. One can decide if to risk upgrading, but systems without any hardware issues will not fail upgrades. So it is in some way "fitness test" for each system.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the hardware in any of these Macs. My Mum's MacBook Air is only 2 years old. Both it and my brother's MacBook Pro successfully installed Big Sur as a clean install with no issues. Though I am disappointed how slowly both run it, perhaps they're still both indexing.

 

[oldmacs]

Time machine usually works fine, but some drives are known to have issues with Time Machine. I had most luck with no-brand USB enclosures/docks and regular internal cheap desktop hard drives. I have all of my Macs backed up with TMs on - each its own and different - combination enclosure/HD and except for occasional drive or enclosure dying (which is expected, nothing lives forever), all systems are backing up correctly all the time. I recall reading here that WD drives were more problem prone than others for TM use, but I do not have my own experience.

My experience has shown otherwise.. These problems I've had over the last week have replicated between 4 different Macs, 7 different external HDDs of differing brands. Has seemed to be software related each time.

 

[oldmacs]

Well I left it go 6 hours and then shut it down. Exactly the same results as two of the other machines. Won't boot, safe mode boots into setting up a Mac like its a fresh install.

THANKS APPLE.

For no good reason whatsoever, I find myself having to perform a clean installation for the third time this week. I've said it about a million times, but I'd much rather pay for MacOS updates and have them come two yearly, so we could at least get half decent releases where this sort of rubbish doesn't go on. Not happy at all.

 

[DeltaMac]

Your mystery progress bar looks like a firmware update.
That is absolutely one that you must let finish.

The macOS installer checks for the latest firmware, and updates it if needed. It is another segment of the macOS install, and yes, looks quite different from the system installer progress bar.
I would suggest that you try the Big Sur install again, even if that Mac is already running Big Sur. Boot to your USB installer, reinstall macOS, let it try to complete this time.
If the firmware update has already successfully completed, then the Big Sur install should complete uneventfully (other than the time that it takes).
If you have been installing Big Sur on HDDs (spinning hard drives) and not SSDs - that is not a direction that I would take voluntarily. The complex APFS setup that Big Sur (and now Monterey) uses is a very poor "player" on a spinning hard drive, even when part of a fusion drive. In my household, I have moved all boot drives to only SSDs.

 

[oldmacs]

Your mystery progress bar looks like a firmware update.
That is absolutely one that you must let finish.

The macOS installer checks for the latest firmware, and updates it if needed. It is another segment of the macOS install, and yes, looks quite different from the system installer progress bar.
I would suggest that you try the Big Sur install again, even if that Mac is already running Big Sur. Boot to your USB installer, reinstall macOS, let it try to complete this time.
If the firmware update has already successfully completed, then the Big Sur install should complete uneventfully (other than the time that it takes).
If you have been installing Big Sur on HDDs (spinning hard drives) and not SSDs - that is not a direction that I would take voluntarily. The complex APFS setup that Big Sur (and now Monterey) uses is a very poor "player" on a spinning hard drive, even when part of a fusion drive. In my household, I have moved all boot drives to only SSDs.

Don't firmware update progress bars have a different design?

The progress bar that it got stuck on for 6 hours is identical to the normal boot up progress bar.

I rebooted from the USB installer and ran the Big Sur update again, but now 40 minutes later I've hit the progress bar in exactly the same position as what it got stuck on for 6 hours.

What now? It can't possibly be a normal occurrence for a Big Sur update to take longer than 6 hours...

2 of the machines that failed exactly like this are fully SSD. This iMac is obviously a fusion drive. The fact that Apple has designed a system that is poor on HDDs is extremely dumb of them considering how recently they were selling machines with fusion drives and even just HDDs.

 

[allan.nyholm]

@oldmacs You mention Fusion Drive in your 2017 iMac? My discovery about that is that Big Sur splits those up? Of the top of my head I can't verify that with a link. It might have been through a discussion on MacRumors.
As an example - through the Big Sur USB and use of the Terminal, there's no more real fusion drive-related commands.

I would suggest going through the trouble of splitting your Fusion Drive then perhaps format the internal hard disk drive with a secure erase to weed out anything drive related issues - perhaps there's a bad sector that Big Sur is more sour about.
Please excuse this half-hearted attempt in trying to help you with your iMac 2017 Big Sur installation-woes

There's also the usual attempts to help the iMac along by resetting SMC - According to Apple it can be a solution to startup related issues.

My hope is that there's someone who can chime in here by agreeing with me or disagreeing in my advice.

 

[oldmacs]

@oldmacs You mention Fusion Drive in your 2017 iMac? My discovery about that is that Big Sur splits those up? Of the top of my head I can't verify that with a link. It might have been through a discussion on MacRumors.
As an example - through the Big Sur USB and use of the Terminal, there's no more real fusion drive-related commands.

I would suggest going through the trouble of splitting your Fusion Drive then perhaps format the internal hard disk drive with a secure erase to weed out anything drive related issues - perhaps there's a bad sector that Big Sur is more sour about.
Please excuse this half-hearted attempt in trying to help you with your iMac 2017 Big Sur installation-woes

I ended up just doing a clean install. Prior to the clean install I ran disk first aid to check that there wasn't anything wrong as well. Every machine in the house is now on Big Sur, so no more machines to do, but hopefully in two years time when I go to upgrade these machines again I don't have such a poor experience!

 

[allan.nyholm]

I ended up just doing a clean install. Prior to the clean install I ran disk first aid to check that there wasn't anything wrong as well. Every machine in the house is now on Big Sur, so no more machines to do, but hopefully in two years time when I go to upgrade these machines again I don't have such a poor experience!

Oh okay. Yeah... here's to hoping that the Monterey installation goes smoothly should you try that on your iMac - I believe it's capable of macOS Monterey. My own 2015 iMac nearly didn't make it onto the list of capable iMacs for macOS Monterey.

 

[MadeTheSwitch]

I ended up just doing a clean install. Prior to the clean install I ran disk first aid to check that there wasn't anything wrong as well. Every machine in the house is now on Big Sur, so no more machines to do, but hopefully in two years time when I go to upgrade these machines again I don't have such a poor experience!

Outside of the upgrading problems, now that you have Big Sur on all 4 computers, how is it running on them? You had mentioned slowness due to maybe indexing. Did that ever go away?

 

[oldmacs]

Outside of the upgrading problems, now that you have Big Sur on all 4 computers, how is it running on them? You had mentioned slowness due to maybe indexing. Did that ever go away?

It's ok... definitely a speed drop off from Mojave unfortunately!

 

[professor_mac]

There's definitely a bug in the recent macOS Big Sur installer or there's an incompatibility on some systems (3rd party kernel extensions for example) causing this issue. I'm a Mac technician and I've had three clients come in with this issue in the past three weeks. In all cases I had to back up the user data and do a clean install in order to fix the problem. It would be a lot faster if the bug or incompatibility could be identified.

 

[oldmacs]

There's definitely a bug in the recent macOS Big Sur installer or there's an incompatibility on some systems (3rd party kernel extensions for example) causing this issue. I'm a Mac technician and I've had three clients come in with this issue in the past three weeks. In all cases I had to back up the user data and do a clean install in order to fix the problem. It would be a lot faster if the bug or incompatibility could be identified.

I'm hugely curious as to what it is! My Mum's MacBook Air had very little in the way of third party anything on it! Office 365, Chrome, Firefox, Citrix, Spotify, Kobo Reader, Zoom, Google Earth, Black Magic Disk Speed Test, Amphetamine and Battery Health are all that come to mind.

My sister's laptop (the only one of the three that successfully updated) has many more applications than this.

However it just occurred to me, the one different might be that she doesn't have Google Chrome, where as the 3 that failed did.....

 

[ProTruckDriver]

The complex APFS setup that Big Sur (and now Monterey) uses is a very poor "player" on a spinning hard drive, even when part of a fusion drive. In my household, I have moved all boot drives to only SSDs.

Thank you. I was about ready to upgrade to Big Sur until I seen this ^^
Looks like I'll be staying with Catalina since I'm running a Fusion Drive and I'm having no problems.

 

[oldmacs]

Oh great. Now two of these machines have been sitting on 'Preparing macOS Big Sur 11.6 10 Minutes remaining' for hours...

What on earth has apple done to the MacOS update process?

 

[Alameda]

I think the upshot here is that Apple needs to do a better job informing the user of the status of the update process, so we can determine whether the update has failed or not.

 

[southsidekeys]

Am in the same boat…. download of Big Sur basically seized.
Eventually I opened machine with safe boot and completed the installation. But now I can’t open the machine in the usual way - I have to go in using the safe mode and although there are some files that I left on the desktop, I can’t get to stuff I had on iCloud. It’s a new startup disk and the rest is …. is it gone?

 

[Alameda]

Advice I do have: If you are upgrading to Big Sur, turn off FileVault disk encryption. This might take hours to do; that's ok, just let it finish un-encrypting your drive before you upgrade. You can then re-enable FileVault once your system is up and running properly.

 

[MrMacintoshBlog]

@oldmacs & @southsidekeys

This is a problem with the big sur installer for sure, sorry this happened to you.

To anyone else who experiences this problem, your data is there and can be recovered. But the macOS upgrade has failed.

I'm working on some documentation to help users rescue their data.