MacBook – Upgrade to High Sierra stalls/fails at “Calculating installation time“

high sierramacbook proupgrade

I am trying to upgrade my 2015 MacBook Pro from Sierra to High Sierra.

I downloaded the installer from the Mac app store and started it. The first slightly alarming sign was during a reboot about a minute or two in the process when the screen went black and then displayed white horizontal bars in places on the screen (like a display glitch) for a few seconds before then rebooting and continuing.

It then displayed the Apple logo with a progress bar which then displayed “Calculating installation time”. This remained on the screen and nothing else seemed to progress any further. I left the installer to continue running overnight, but when I woke up this morning it was still stuck in the same place, and the progress bar had not moved.

Realising that the installation had probably failed, I rebooted to try again. Now I cannot get beyond entering my password to unlock the storage drive (SSD), some console errors appear briefly on the screen, and then I get a multilingual message on a black screen to wait or press a key to reboot.

What should I do now?

Is it:

Try to launch the recovery system (if this has not already been wiped),
Reinstall the existing OS from there (or from USB stick, failing that),
Restore my files from Time Machine,
Try again?

I saw in another post that someone else had problems upgrading, apparently due to having an NTFS driver installed. I have the Paragon NTFS driver installed to allow me to use NTFS external drives. Given that High Sierra has new rules about kernel extensions, which I imagine a file system driver must use, it sounds as though I should perhaps uninstall this before trying to upgrade again?

Best Answer

I finally managed to resolve this problem by attempting to see if I could use MacOS Recovery to reinstall the existing OS, if this was still possible.

Recovering the existing OS seemed not to be possible, but I was able to unlock and mount the laptop's drive (which seemed to be the point where the previous OS upgrade attempt had failed) using the recovery system's Disk Utility, and then use the internet recovery option to install MacOS High Sierra via the internet.

The installation was successful this time, the drive was converted from HFS Plus to APFS successfully, and my data was preserved.

Related Solutions

MacOS High Sierra (10.13) Upgrade Fails With Endless Kernel Panic Loop

Sorry for the lack of specificity, but I finally was able to get macOS High Sierra (10.13) installed on my Mac mini (Late 2012; 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5) with 16GB of memory and an internal disk that is a plain hard disk drive; not an SSD.

I reset the System Management Controller (SMC).
I reset the NVRAM.
I disconnected all USB peripherals—including a simple/small unpowered USB hub—except for a direct connection between keyboard and mouse and the system.
I then ran Onyx and cleaned all caches—“System” and “User”—before launching the “Install macOS High Sierra” installer.

Crossed my fingers, let it do what it had to do and lo and behold… Everything went as expected!

The only hint of something I noticed before doing this—that might help someone—is I had a bootable USB backup of my main system disk attached during the last failed attempt to upgrade and—this is important—it didn’t seem like I had an explicitly selected startup disk set. The system seemed to just always default to my internal hard disk drive, but never explicitly had that set. I made sure to set that after I reset the SMC and NVRAM. Like I said, not 100% sure that is the cause but it is something to keep in mind.

Cannot upgrade to High Sierra: Unable to unmount volume for repair

Unfortunately, the solution to my problem was to wipe and do a fresh install of High Sierra and then restore from my Time Machine backup on first boot. Here are the steps I took. You'll need the following to do this:

An external USB thumb drive with at least 8 GB of free space
An external hard drive with at least 50 GB of free space

Make sure you have a functional, up-to-date Time Machine backup

To do this I did a manual Time Machine backup than deleted and restored a file I care about.

Download High Sierra and make and an installation drive

Download the High Sierra installer from the App Store. Attach the USB thumb drive to your Mac and then make a bootable, High Sierra installation disk out of thumb drive by running the following in Terminal:

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app

Where /Volumes/Untitled should be replaced with the name of your USB thumb drive.

Format an external drive and install High Sierra on that drive

I used an older 500GB LaCie I keep kicking around for just these cases. It's fast and built well so I can trust it. Use the attached thumb drive to run the High Sierra installer. When asked which drive to install the operating system on to, click the Show More Devices button and select that USB hard drive. The installation should proceed without a problem and when the computer reboots you'll be booted from the remote drive and dropped into High Sierra. You can skip the first boot setup. You won't be using this for very long. Just make a temp account and get to logging in.

Force unmount the internal fusion drive and format it

Here is where the scary bit begins. You're going to force unmount the fusion drive because it'll still be mounted (and stuck) when you boot the external High Sierra image. To do this I opened up Terminal and ran:

sudo diskutil unmount force /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

You should replace /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD with the name of your fusion drive before you run that command. Once the drive is unmounted you can format it like so:

sudo diskutil reformat /dev/disk2

You should replace /dev/disk2 in the above command with whatever your disk number is for your fusion drive.

Install High Sierra to your fusion drive using the installer

With the drive wiped you can proceed to install High Sierra on it using the USB thumb drive you turned into a bootable, High Sierra installation drive. Same as before, run the High Sierra installer from the thumb drive and when it asks you which disk to target select Show More Devices and find your fusion drive in the list.

The installation should proceed without a problem now and when your machine reboots you'll be booted from the internal drive.

Follow the first boot prompts and restore from your Time Machine backup

You'll have to pick your region, connect your keyboard and mouse, and then setup WiFi. Once that is done the first boot process will give you the option to restore the computer from a Time Machine backup. Select this option. Select everything on the backup that you want restored and follow the prompts.

Once the restore is complete you should have a functioning High Sierra installation with all your data and user accounts on it.