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Catalina upgrade stalled. How to proceed?

Upgrade to Catalina from Mojave has stalled (10 hours) on 2017 iMac. It has hung on “Setting up your Mac” splash screen. What should I do?

Posted on Oct 14, 2019 6:47 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 14, 2019 7:55 PM

Press and hold down the Power button until the computer shuts down. Wait 30 seconds then restart the machine. If you boot into your Mojave system, then do the following:


Repair the Drive for El Capitan or Later


  1. Restart the computer. Immediately, at or before the chime, hold down the Command and R keys until the Utility Menu appears.
  2. Select Disk Utility and press the Continue button.
  3. Then select the indented (usually, Macintosh HD) volume entry from the side list. 
  4. Click on the First Aid tab in the toolbar and wait for the Done button to activate. Click on it, then quit Disk Utility.
  5. Select Restart from the Apple menu.


Retry the Catalina installation. If you did not save a copy of the installer in your Downloads folder, then you will have to re-download Catalina: Download macOS Catalina from the Mac App Store.

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 14, 2019 7:55 PM in response to Bob Ware

Press and hold down the Power button until the computer shuts down. Wait 30 seconds then restart the machine. If you boot into your Mojave system, then do the following:


Repair the Drive for El Capitan or Later


  1. Restart the computer. Immediately, at or before the chime, hold down the Command and R keys until the Utility Menu appears.
  2. Select Disk Utility and press the Continue button.
  3. Then select the indented (usually, Macintosh HD) volume entry from the side list. 
  4. Click on the First Aid tab in the toolbar and wait for the Done button to activate. Click on it, then quit Disk Utility.
  5. Select Restart from the Apple menu.


Retry the Catalina installation. If you did not save a copy of the installer in your Downloads folder, then you will have to re-download Catalina: Download macOS Catalina from the Mac App Store.

Catalina upgrade stalled. How to proceed?

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