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Just wondering if anyone has the same issue. Never happened to me, but I can't update macOS. I have 10.15.3 and the update notice on the desktop. I hit "update now" and the it asks me to reboot; I do it but after reboot I am still on 10.15.3 and the process begins over and over again.

Edited with picture from diskutility.

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    Please read this - Ask Different question checklist - & see what additional information you can add. As it stands your question will need a 20-questions-style back & forth to even begin to diagnose what's happened.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Mar 27, 2020 at 9:42
  • Sorry. I understand the question was vague, but it was not intended as "looking for a fix" but rather as "is anyone experiencing the same thing?" while I was searching for a fix. Found it and will post is as answer.
    – BMM
    Commented Mar 28, 2020 at 10:45
  • Use the Console app to locate the installer log file, then see what the installer log says went wrong.
    – Spiff
    Commented Mar 28, 2020 at 15:24

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Yeah, you're definitely short on space... :-D OK, you need to make some room on this drive, so if you've got an external hard drive (or several), copy whatever content you must to free AT LEAST 15GB of space on your Mac, then try to update again. Unplug your external drive(s) before you do that.

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Locate the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist file and cut-paste it somewhere else, on your Desktop for example, then reboot your Mac, and check for updates again.

EDIT: you'll need to enter your admin password to do that. If you encounter resistance, try this in Terminal:

sudo mv /System/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Users/Your-username/Desktop (Enter)

sudo

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  • Thank you. I did that but the problem still persists. Something is preventing the update to be applied.
    – BMM
    Commented Mar 28, 2020 at 15:20
  • Sometimes, booting in Safe Mode is the solution: several system caches are cleared when you do that. You could also try Onyx or any other maintenance tool to do that while you're in a regular user session, but Safe Mode usually does the trick.
    – user1019780
    Commented Mar 28, 2020 at 16:57
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    How much free space do you have on both your system-reserved and MacintoshHD partitions? If macOS is going to download the whole update image, it's going to need space to store the .dmg file, and to expand it before writing it to your system partition. If you're short on space, this is going to be a problem, because a good chunk of the data will have to be written to disk, then properly installed upon reboot. Only a small part of it (kernel and a few dependencies) are stored in RAM during install. Can you post a screenshot of your Disk Utility window?
    – user1019780
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 19:11
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    Yeah, you're definitely short on space... :-D OK, you need to make some room on this drive, so if you've got an external hard drive (or several), copy whatever content you must to free AT LEAST 15GB of space on your Mac, then try to update again. Unplug your external drive(s) before you do that.
    – user1019780
    Commented Mar 30, 2020 at 8:35
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    You're welcome. Glad to know it worked out for you!
    – user1019780
    Commented Mar 30, 2020 at 9:34
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Trying to install it via system/preferences resulted in my mac rebooting with no update done, and no clear error message, so I have downloaded the installer pkg from Apple's site and tried a manual install. By trying to install the package the installer showed that I needed 1GB of extra space on my drive, so that was the problem: lack of available storage. IMHO Apple should throw an immediate warning to the user after failing to update trough system preferences (as it's the standard way of doing it). EDIT: very strange. My system did appear as updated on 10.15.4 when going to apple logo / about this mac. But after one reboot, it gone back to initial state. This is not the solution.

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