El Capitan failed update

As of late, I am getting a bit frustrated with the problems when upgrading Mac OS.  I tried upgrading 2 systems last night from Yosemite to El Capitan.  One was successful and one was not.  If my memory servers me right, I had the same batting average from upgrading to Yosemite.  I am not unhappy that one of the upgrades failed but rather HOW it failed and the state it left my iMac.

After what seemed like a successful upgrade to El Capitan, I then opened up the App Store to upgrade the other outstanding applications.  Each of the update I tried failed, so I decided to restart my iMac to try again.  This is when all the problem manifested itself.  During the startup, the Apple logo would come up along with a progress bar.  Unfortunately no matter how long I waited, there was NO progress on the grey screen.

After doing some quick research, it is sad to say there was quite a bit of discussion of this exact same problem.  I tried doing both a SMC and PRAM reset without success after disconnected all unnecessary peripherals.  All the other discussions seem to lead down the path of either a hard disk problem or kext issue.  Tackling the easier of the 2 possibilities first, I booted into recovery mode and did a repair disk.  It turned out there was an issue that was repaired.  However on restart, the problem persisted.

So the next step is to check into kext in more detail.  So unless you are a geek, you would not know what a kext is.  Kext stands for kernel extensions.  They are used to extend the operating system by allowing additional code to be loaded when the Mac starts up.  So it is quite possibly I had a 3rd party kext that was incompatible with El Capitan and preventing the startup.  I forgot to mention that once I got the grey screen, I could NOT boot into safe mode as well.  Some users opted to do a clean install at this point rather than waste time troubleshooting.  Since I did not want to spend the time to ensure everything was backed up to my satisfaction AND re-install all my applications right now, I persisted in trying to find a solution.

Next I booted in Recovery mode again, and installed El Capitan again.  This took awhile since there was a download and install to wait on.  Once it was finished, I was back once again using El Capitan.  I tried to do some application updates.  They worked!  Hoping for the best, I decided to restart again.....and up comes the grey screen again.  This is ridiculous!  So I re-did the install again to get back into El Capitan.  While waiting, I continued researching and found my ultimate solution on superuser.  It turns out that I recently installed Syncmate but was not using.  I think I was trying to copy some files over to an Android tablet.

Here is what I did:
1)  You can get to Terminal app from the Recovery mode on startup.  Or as I was already in El Capitan, I just ran Terminal.
2)  If you are using the default hard drive name "Macintosh HD", type in
 cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/Extensions
3) Execute command:
  ls -la | grep EltimaAsync.kext
4a) If nothing appeared after this command, then the problem is not caused by SyncMate 4.
4b) If something is returned then execute these 2 command : 
 sudo rm -rf ./EltimaAsync.kext
 sudo kextcache -update-volume /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/
5) Restart your Mac.

Whoomp there it is!

I was continue with initial thought when I started writing this up.  In my opinion, the main reason most people have switched from Windows to a Mac is that Apple has hidden away all the technical difficulties one might experience in supporting an operating system.  It is supposed to be so easy that you just push a button and the magic happens.  With the difficulties I have experienced, how can the novice user ever recover from a problem like this?  Instead if the update failed, and the system was rolled back that would be definitely be more acceptable.  Apple.....please listen....you cannot leave your users in this kind of mess.  I know you can restore from Time Machine, but that it still not a user friendly solution!