Luckily, I then decided to try safe mode and verbose mode at the same time. I did try safe mode, but when it showed exactly the same behaviour - a frozen bootup screen with nothing happening - I gave up after 15 minutes and restarted the machine. Turned out I needed to start the device in safe mode and let Sierra finish its installation - sorting out whatever incompatibility there was automatically. For future generations, here's what I did: It also seems weird that the problem is unchanged in safe mode. I've started removing third party kexts, but so far without luck. This discussion seems to hint that the problem could be an incompatible kernel extension that the installer didn't recognize as problematic. Booting into safe mode (no Change, boot gets stuck)īecause my last full backup is a week old and I didn't make one before I ran the upgrade (I know I know) it would be very painful to format the HDD, or restore the backup.ĭoes MacOS have a boot log somewhere that I can look at from the recovery console?Įdit: so I discovered verbose mode and managed to find out what the system apparently is getting hung up on: SmartBattery: finished polling type 2.Booting into the recovery console and running Disk Utility's first aid (which says did not encounter any problems).Booting into the recovery console and re-running the Sierra install.Waiting 8 hours to see whether it'd move after all.It'll get stuck on the boot screen (with the Apple logo) with the progress indicator completely finished. Yesterday I decided to upgrade from El Capitan to Sierra.Īs it turns out, that was not a good idea: the Installation worked, but now after the first reboot, the machine won't boot any more.

Upgrade el capitan to sierra