MacOS – Can’t update from OSX 10.9.5 to OSX Yosemite 10.10

The process to enable FileVault will read the entire 500 GB of data - whether the block is empty or full and encrypt it with the keys you set up as part of the process. So, the background IO will run the fastest if you don't have other user level disk IO running. The encryption itself will take less than 10% of one CPU on that powerful (fast) Mac - so you are really just going to see a sustained 60 to 80 MB/s re-write of the entire drive if you let the Mac sit idle. A Mac with a spinning hard drive would see between 20 to 30 MB/s so an Air or any Mac with solid state drives will be two to three times faster in this operation.

So - from the time you start, I would estimate 2-3 hours if you are getting at least 70 MB/s for writing the encrypted data back to the disk. This process does run in the background and isn't really reversible once it starts, so you can kick it off and then track the progress with diskutil.

  diskutil cs list

My guess from the details provided is that you don't need to apply any patches since Apple has patched bash as part of 10.9.5. If you really aren't on 10.9.5 yet, then keep reading...

Here is what an Apple-patched as of October 8, 2014 Mac should show from terminal:

mac:~ mike$ sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.9.5
BuildVersion:   13F34
mac:~ mike$ which bash &&  `which bash` --version
/bin/bash
GNU bash, version 3.2.53(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

(If you are new to terminal, just type the parts after ** mac:~ mike$** so:

sw_vers
which bash &&  `which bash` --version

After you've compared your values, you can quit the terminal app.

If your versions are not as above, I would delete your update files and start over. Download a new patch from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1760 and then open the console app. Look on the left for a toggle button "show log list / hide log list" and show the list. Open the triangle under /var/log and click on install.log - set a marker and then run the installer package.

Watch that log for any errors relating to the manual patch.