Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Done an internet recovery and it’s therefore reset my 2011 iMac to OS X Lion. On the utilities window, I have gone to reinstall Mac OS X but it is not showing any disks for me to load this onto?? how do i get my startup disk back???
Your startup disk has probably failed, which is probably also why you’re trying to reinstall.
Run Hardware Test, but you’re probably headed for a replacement hard disk drive or a replacement SSD, if you plan to try to get a few more years out of this Mac.
Your startup disk has probably failed, which is probably also why you’re trying to reinstall.
Run Hardware Test, but you’re probably headed for a replacement hard disk drive or a replacement SSD, if you plan to try to get a few more years out of this Mac.
Two storage devices? Was one a comparatively dinky SSD, and one a comparatively capacios HDD? If so, you very likely have a Fusion drive, and can need to re-assemble that. And either part of a Fusion drive can fail; the SSD part, or the HDD part. I’d tend to replace a flaky drive pre-emprively, usually with an equivalent or larger SSD if the price is feasible. For some folks, Fusion was an adequate compromise years ago, but SSD prices continue to drop while capacities are increasing.
The SuperDrive either doesn’t have media loaded, or it’s what you booted from if you’re using optical media here, and in any case it’s not where you want to install Lion.
And I’d again encourage loading something newer than Lion, as that release is going to have issues with secure network connectivity via SSL/TLS, minimally.
What does Hardware Test show? That will report far from all possible errors, but it’ll find some common ones. (Apple has better diagnostics that they use.)
Hard disk drives work well right up until they don’t. The disk can fail slowly and gradually, and can slow performance as the hardware tries to and successfully recovers from the increasing tide of errors, or hard disks (or SSDs or computers) can fail catastrophically and all at once and just drop offline. (We don’t get the smoke and grinding and loud pinging and metal-on-metal screeching of old-time hard disk drive head crashes, alas. Those could be impressive.)
The I/O load of a volume repair attempt or of a re-install can push the failing hard disk over into full failure, which is why grabbing a backup on a slow system can be a priority over any other related recovery efforts.
Use Disk Utility from Recovery and try to confirm that the internal disk is GUID-partitioned (GPT-partitioned) and that the file system is HFS+ journaled hierarchical file system. If you’ve re-installed, that should be the default as far back as macOS Lion.
But with a ~decade old Mac, a failed HDD is a reasonable bet.
An SSD upgrade is usually an option, and it’ll typically be a big performance boost over a hard disk drive too. OWC has a pretty good reputation around SSD upgrades including for iMac, though there are other vendors. Or a local Apple service provider will usually be willing to swap for a new HDD or new SSD.
Thanks so much for your help so far. I tried putting it into internet recovery and then reinstalling Mac OS and it came up with a couple of options. I think there were 2 drives but both only had like 4GB of space on it (drive should be 1TB) and the other said Super Drive but was faded and unable to be clicked. Any idea what that’s all about??
It was working well until I had to put it in the car and transport it. I thought the transfer went fine but is it possible the disk was knocked or fell out of place??
The Hardware Test comes back with error code
4SNS/1/40000000:TH00-9.000
The hard disk sensor is reporting an error. If this isn’t already a replacement hard disk, then the hard disk or maybe the cable are suspect, though there can be other triggers.
Where did my disk go??
