A friend of mine just got a new iMac from Best Buy. Installation phase went fine (I'm pretty sure OS came installed). She got to the "Setting up your Mac" phase and it's been stuck for about 3 hours right now. Never took this long before in dealing with Macs, ever.
Knowing potential problems with powering down during an install, I've been avoiding the turning-it-off-and-on-again option. Is it save to power down and reboot? I really don't know what OSX does during this step so I've been avoiding this possibility.
Today is Dec 26; Apple's servers might be overwhelmed with installs right now but I can't be certain since I've never purchased Macs anywhere except from Apple directly.
[FYI I have told her to contact Apple care and I suspect they might tell her to do something like that.]
I don't know the model iMac it is; she hasn't gotten back to me on our iMessage conversation. Once I know it I'll post it here. I'm pretty sure the computer is new since she got it from Best Buy; I at least know it's a clean HD.
Thx.
Matt
Best Answer
I had the same thing with my Non-retina MacBook Pro 13 back in August. I actually had to reboot several times because it hung up on me (after waiting several hours).
Nothing was harmed, the setup process should resume from where you left off.