You know the thing… installing stuff on Windows where it counts down, and sometimes up again, then gets to 100% and seems to wait for ages. Our washing machine seems to run on Microsoft time too.
Well, so too it seems does our old MacBook. This is a 2015 or so 13″ MacBook Pro and is no longer used so sits on a shelf. I had it set up as me for testing but wanted to clean it all out so it can be sold. That’s where things went a tad wrong.
For some reason it took ages to even log in – very unusual as these generally boot in seconds. Then, after the reset it would not boot at all. Long story cut…
I set it going doing a restore over the Internet. It began saying it would take 2 hours. Ok. This changed to 12 hours and seemed to come down ok, 11, then 10 each taking about an hour. Then it got down to 9 hours and dropped to 12 minutes! After an hour at 12 minutes left it went to 21 minutes and showed the Apple logo. After another hour it apparently had less than a minute to go. After 2 hours of that I gave up and rebooted it. It went straight back to 29 minutes, then 1 and sat there again. Hmmm.
So I downloaded MacOS onto a USB stick and booted the Mac that way. This fired up and said 4 hours (from an attached USB??) but dropped to a few minutes. I left it running but those few minutes became an hour before it finally finished.
It is not a happy Mac…