Trouble Upgrading to Catalina

[TDSnet]

Hi,

I have a friend's MacBook Air running OS X 10.9.5 and I'm trying to upgrade it to Catalina via the App Store for her. I opened the Catalina page in the App Store and clicked Get and then followed the steps but when it got to the part about "Catalina will be installed on this hard drive" it just sat there doing nothing for about half an hour before I finally gave up and quit it. The result is that Catalina is NOT installed, yet when I go into the App Store again and open the Catalina page the Get button now says Installed and there's nothing more I can do.

Can anyone advise what I can do at this point..? I'm from a Windows background and am completely lost..!!

Kind regards,
Jack

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

It can take more than 30 mins to install, since Catalina will also convert the drive to APFS format. It usually restarts a couple of times during the installation. I wonder if you didn't give it enough time?

-I assume this is a McBook from 2012 or later?
-How much free space is left on the drive?
-Do they have a current Time Machine or other backup of the data?

C

 

[TDSnet]

Thanks Cory,

I was wondering whether to simply leave it, but I couldn't see any signs of progress. There were no visual indicators on the form such as a progress bar or even a wait cursor, and the free space on the drive wasn't shrinking, so it didn't seem like it was downloading anything large either.

She's had it about 4 years she thinks. It's running an i5 processor with 4gb of RAM and there's about 63gb of free space on the HDD.

I'm happy to try it again but I now have this issue of the App Store saying it's installed when it's not, so I can no longer follow the link from there. Any thoughts on how to remedy that..?

It doesn't get used much so the backup is a no, but there's nothing on there that requires saving.

Regards,
Jack

 

[sgage]

I had the exact same issue. I was told on the Apple Support Forum that from Mavericks you need to update to El Capitan first, then you can get to Catalina. I have downloaded the El Cap installer from the Apple Store, but haven't attempted the upgrade yet. I'm beginning to wonder if I really need to upgrade... everything works so smoothly now...

 

[Cory Cooper]

sgage makes a good point...I forgot about that step, since it has been so long. Thanks!

You can get the El Capitan installer from here as well: How to upgrade to OS X El Capitan

C