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Recovery stuck on "examining volumes"

Having frequent crashing problems (mostly waking after sleep) on Mac Mini with latest version of Catalina. So bad it is unusable now, so I tried recovery.


No matter how i boot into recovery (from built in partition, recovery over the internet, or a bootable USB device) the recovery process goes straight into "examining volumes" and stays there with the spinning wheel and never moves beyond that. I have let it run for 3 to 4 hours - no luck.


Any way to force beyond that phase and just proceed on, or any idea on how to get to a log in the recovery process and find out what is going on?


Google searches fruitless. Thanks in advance.

j

Posted on Mar 26, 2020 7:27 AM

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Jun 16, 2020 4:54 PM in response to tam197

You can use a bootable Parted Magic USB drive which is just a Linux utility disk with a customized app which makes it easy to access the SSD's built-in hardware secure erase feature. The last free version of Parted Magic is available from the MajorGeeks' link here. If the free version doesn't boot your Mac, then you will need to get the current paid version or use Linux if you are familiar with Linux. You can use the downloaded .iso file as a source for Etcher (Mac/Windows/Linux) which can "burn" the .iso file to USB.


Option Boot the Parted Magic USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". There should be an icon on the Parted Magic desktop for erasing drives. Within this app there are several different methods to erase a drive, but only one of them will utilize the built-in hardware feature which will reset the SSD to factory defaults. You want to select the "ATA Secure Erase" option which will prompt you to sleep & wake the computer as well as prompt you to create a temporary password. Keep this temporary password simple like "abc" since it is only used to activate the hardware feature. If the secure erase fails or is interrupted for any reason you will need to use this password to disable the ATA security feature or the SSD will permanently locked and unusable. The ATA Secure Erase can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes to complete. Make sure a laptop is plugged into the charger.


Here is a Parted Magic article with details for the ATA Secure Erase for the current paid version of Parted Magic. While the look of the old app is different the procedure is basically the same.

https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/


Keep in mind not all Apple SSDs have this built-in hardware feature. This will also only work on 2015 and earlier Apple computers & SSDs.

Recovery stuck on "examining volumes"

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