I'm having the absolute hardest time installing Catalina on a 2017 iMac. I've tried both developer betas and today's public beta and i'm not able to install the OS on my iMac. The issue with every single installation is that it starts to install the OS and it'll get to a point where it says it has 10 minutes to go for example and all of a sudden it'll go from 10 minutes to the point where it wants you to restart to complete the installation. If I restart, it'll try to install the OS and again go from a certain point to all done and then it reboots and i'm not able to startup the computer. I've tried installing it on a freshly wiped drive and also as an upgrade. I've tried installing the OS in Safe Mode and via Recovery mode with a bootable USB installation drive and the result is the same every time. I've run First Aid on the drive and there were no issues to fix. I have no issues at all installing Mojave updates. Luckily, I have a Time Machine back-up ready on an SSD drive so I can get back up and running in less 30 minutes. It's the most bizarre thing because i've installed Catalina on both a 2018 MacBook Pro and a 2014 mac Mini without any issues whatsoever. I downloaded the installation log hoping someone can help me make some sense of this and help me find a way to be able to install Catalina. Any insight anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.
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Cannot install Catalina on 2017 iMac
- Thread starter jfiggy77
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The only thing I came across in that log is this which appears several times:
Jun 24 16:06:37 Josues-iMac osinstallersetupd[2007]: disk7s2 is not convertible to APFS: You may not install to this volume because it can not be converted to Apple File System (APFS).
Also, I'm not sure I would trust running Disk Utility First Aid and finding no errors. I use the "DriveDX.app" which is not free but it does give a much better comprehensive overview of the drive.
Jun 24 16:06:37 Josues-iMac osinstallersetupd[2007]: disk7s2 is not convertible to APFS: You may not install to this volume because it can not be converted to Apple File System (APFS).
Also, I'm not sure I would trust running Disk Utility First Aid and finding no errors. I use the "DriveDX.app" which is not free but it does give a much better comprehensive overview of the drive.
My main drive that i'm trying to install to is formatted APFS. That disk in the log and the other one that appears are external hard drives I have connected. I'll take a look at DriveDC and see if that helps.
I removed all attached usb devices (except my boot ssd) and then deleted the installer forcing it to download again - this fixed it for me.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try this tonight and see if I have any luck.
[doublepost=1561492722][/doublepost]I'm going to remove all the USB drives and devices tonight like @cyclingplatypus suggested and re-download the installer and hopefully i'll have some luck. If that works, i'll let you know.
I did everything you suggested @cyclingplatypus and still wasn't able to install Catalina. I'm really at a loss. At least there is some comfort in knowing that i'm not the only one who has run into this issue but i wish I could figure out what is causing it.
[doublepost=1561514877][/doublepost]For those of you who ran into this issue, what kind of computer are you trying to install Catalina on? I'm using a 2017 Retina 5K, 27-inch iMac with a 2TB fusion drive, 3.8 GHz Intel Core i5, 40GB of RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8 GB. I'd like to see if there are any similarities to possibly find the cause. I have a spare 1TB SSD drive that I may just give in and use as a boot drive if I can't get this to work.
Just as a follow-up, I installed Catalina on a 1TB external SSD and didn’t have any issues. I then did a migration from my Mojave drive to the Catalina drive of my apps, files, and settings and it went great. Whatever the issue is with installing Catalina on my internal drive I believe is drive related and possibly something to do with the way the drive is formatted. I just can’t see any difference between the way the internal drive is formatted and the way I formatted the SSD drive. I might go all the way back to the beginning and reformat the drive with the GUI partition and then install Catalina from a bootable thumb drive in recovery. I usually just do an erase of the drive but I may go back one step in the formatting process and reformat the GUI partition first so it’s ready for an OS installation.
The only way I found to fix this (assuming you've rebooted and re-ran the install) is to delete and reinstall the partition from scratch on the internal SSD. If you have a time machine backup - it's not an issue.
You'll of course need to build a Catalina USB stick.
John.
You'll of course need to build a Catalina USB stick.
John.
I have a bootable USB stick with Beta 2 of Catalina so I’m going to try reinstalling the partition from scratch this weekend. If it doesn’t work, I have no idea what else to try.
I’d format it to HPFS first, just to make sure all the APFS volume info is wiped properly, then convert the HPFS volume back to APFS and all should install just fine.
John.
We have success!!! I completely wiped and redid the partition and wiped and reformatted the disk and formatted it as Mac OS Extended not APFS. I then installed Catalina and it finally installed without a hitch! I’m currently migrating my files, apps, and settings from my last time machine backup. Thank you @john.burn!
I 'inherited' a(n) MBP9,2 2012 and put in a(n) SSD - and had the same problems as @jfiggy77. By way of Google, I got here. Thanks to you @john.burn, my 'new' laptop is up and running Catalina. I wasted only one day. And I didn't need to do any conversion to APFS.