High Sierra Upgrade failures

[EdSinger]

My late 2012 MacBook Air - memory 4 gb, disk 250 gb (available 149.9 gb) is running Yosemite 10.10.5



I decided to upgrade to High Sierra, but the upgrade has failed eleven times. I simply followed the unprompted invitation to upgrade to HSierra. No error messages explained the failure, no indication apart from the blue thermometer bar stopping short of completion, sometimes by 50% but usually only a centimetre or less from completion. The bar moves so slowly that it takes careful observation over a considerable time to be sure that we are going nowhere with it. I have left it overnight to be absolutely certain.



Activity Monitor has something called “osinstallersetupplaind” running at position 2 in the activity list whether the stall point has arrived or not. “Install MacOS Sierra” runs at various points in the list, sometimes more active than at other times, before the process stalls. After stalling — no sign of it.



I would understand if I do not have enough memory or SSD capacity, but it is galling to be wasting time, never knowing if it will finish or not, and never seing the slightest trace of an error message. Back in my mainframe programming days we would say the process is in a loop. Any advice/help will be welcomed. Thanks.

 

[honestone]

I recently sold my late 2012 13" MacBook Air with a 252 gig SSD, and High Sierra worked fine on it (I now have a mid 2017 13" MacBook Air with a 252 gig SSD, and again High Sierra is working fine). I suspect you tried to upgrade "in place", ie, basically have High Sierra (OS 10.13.3?) overwrite/replace Yosemite. That type of upgrade sometimes works for folks, sometimes not. What usually works best is a clean, fresh installation of the new Mac OS, and then "migrating"/copying needed stuff from a backup. So, need to ask some questions:

1. How exactly did you try to upgrade?

2. Have you ever done an disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective? By that I mean have you ever run any disk-related software to help with those tasks? There are some excellent products available (both free and commercial) that can help you with that.

3. This is critical: are you making backups to an external device? If yo are, what software are you using for that?

4. Did you insure that all your third party software (ie, non-Apple) is compatible with High Sierra? This site can help you with that:

https://roaringapps.com/apps

5. Why did you decide to upgrade? High Sierra really has very little, if any, new features. If you want to upgrade, it might be better to go to El Capitan first. As it is, you are basically skipping 2 versions of the Mac OS to try and get to High Sierra, without any significant advances. But with the way Apple is handling how one obtains an OS these days, that could be difficult.

6. How are you making posts here, ie, can you still use your MacBook Air?

 

[EdSinger]

My late 2012 MacBook Air - memory 4 gb, disk 250 gb (available 149.9 gb) is running Yosemite 10.10.5



I decided to upgrade to High Sierra, but the upgrade has failed eleven times. I simply followed the unprompted invitation to upgrade to HSierra. No error messages explained the failure, no indication apart from the blue thermometer bar stopping short of completion, sometimes by 50% but usually only a centimetre or less from completion. The bar moves so slowly that it takes careful observation over a considerable time to be sure that we are going nowhere with it. I have left it overnight to be absolutely certain.



Activity Monitor has something called “osinstallersetupplaind” running at position 2 in the activity list whether the stall point has arrived or not. “Install MacOS Sierra” runs at various points in the list, sometimes more active than at other times, before the process stalls. After stalling — no sign of it.



I would understand if I do not have enough memory or SSD capacity, but it is galling to be wasting time, never knowing if it will finish or not, and never seing the slightest trace of an error message. Back in my mainframe programming days we would say the process is in a loop. Any advice/help will be welcomed. Thanks.

I recently sold my late 2012 13" MacBook Air with a 252 gig SSD, and High Sierra worked fine on it (I now have a mid 2017 13" MacBook Air with a 252 gig SSD, and again High Sierra is working fine). I suspect you tried to upgrade "in place", ie, basically have High Sierra (OS 10.13.3?) overwrite/replace Yosemite. That type of upgrade sometimes works for folks, sometimes not. What usually works best is a clean, fresh installation of the new Mac OS, and then "migrating"/copying needed stuff from a backup. So, need to ask some questions:

1. How exactly did you try to upgrade?

2. Have you ever done an disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective? By that I mean have you ever run any disk-related software to help with those tasks? There are some excellent products available (both free and commercial) that can help you with that.

3. This is critical: are you making backups to an external device? If yo are, what software are you using for that?

4. Did you insure that all your third party software (ie, non-Apple) is compatible with High Sierra? This site can help you with that:

https://roaringapps.com/apps

5. Why did you decide to upgrade? High Sierra really has very little, if any, new features. If you want to upgrade, it might be better to go to El Capitan first. As it is, you are basically skipping 2 versions of the Mac OS to try and get to High Sierra, without any significant advances. But with the way Apple is handling how one obtains an OS these days, that could be difficult.

6. How are you making posts here, ie, can you still use your MacBook Air?

 

[EdSinger]

Q6 first. I use a MacPro for most things -- like this query. The laptop still works with Yosemite after each upgrade failure. The MacPro was upgraded to HSierra a while back and the upgrade was problem-free.

Q1. App Store invite to upgrade. After a dump with CCC I just went into the upgrade procedure as asked. For a few hours all runs normally.

Q2. Can't remember. I have 'CleanMyMac 3' on the Mac Pro but it is not installed on the MBAir. Licensing??

Q3. No regular Backups - CCCloner is used prior to an attempt at upgrade (but not all eleven times, just once). Also no TimeMachine dumps. (no need - nothing too precious to keep track of)

Q4. No. On the Mac Pro I have noted that the upgrade flags and separates anything that won't run.

Q5. Why? I just don't want to be stranded and cut off from OSX upgrades. The Laptop is only used when I am on the move and need some files -- like on a USB pen. I would LOVE to go at it incrementally, but I understood (from a Mac mag) that this is no longer possible - HSierra or nothing. If you have a way around this - please tell.

By the way - I am so impressed that you guys want to be helpful and give of your time and advice here. Sincerest thanks.

 

[Peter Aretin]

Interesting. I recently upgraded a 10.9.5 bootable partition to High Sierra to get Hulu to work better and to try out High Sierra. The CPU is a mid-2010 macmini. I didn't do a clean install mainly because I wanted EyeTV to retain the guide subscription cloned from my main disk after the upgrade. I used the upgrade link in App Store. It took a long time, but as far as I can see the installation is fine. I did do a fresh update of the clone with CCC first. The only peculiarity noticed so far is that to boot up again in my internal drive running Mavericks, choosing that drive in Startup Disks and choosing restart, it shuts down and then seems to hang. I have to shut down with the power switch and then switch back on to boot up on the internal OS again. I post this merely by way of confirmation that High Sierra will in fact install over an older OS on an older machine. I did upgrade to 15 GB memory. Good luck.