I had one Mac with barely anything on it but OS X 10.10, it got stuck at 11 minutes remaining. 75% of 140 Macs here have done that. I’ve left machines over a week, they won't wait it out! I think I’ve found the cause. It’s Macs that have the root user account enabled that will hang, if you look at the log it says "Transferring Documents for System Administrator", this is NOT the "admin" account we create, it's referring instead to the "root" user.
How to fix? Boot recovery partition, launch terminal, navigate to your hd, usually “CD /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD”, go into Recovered Items “CD Recovered\ Items” and delete all folders starting with a lower case letter, usually bin, sbin, var, and usr. Don’t delete the others. Type “Reboot” and let it boot the failed HD, now just install OS X El Capitan, it will work every time.
How to avoid in the first place? Maybe disable the root account from the Directory Utility BEFORE upgrading to El Capitan.
How to fix? Boot recovery partition, launch terminal, navigate to your hd, usually “CD /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD”, go into Recovered Items “CD Recovered\ Items” and delete all folders starting with a lower case letter, usually bin, sbin, var, and usr. Don’t delete the others. Type “Reboot” and let it boot the failed HD, now just install OS X El Capitan, it will work every time.
How to avoid in the first place? Maybe disable the root account from the Directory Utility BEFORE upgrading to El Capitan.
