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.

Posted on Mar 26, 2020 7:27 AM

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17 replies

Barney-15E

Level 10

124,866 points

Mar 26, 2020 10:34 AM in response to jerichod505

My guess would be some problem with your SSD (and with Apple’s code that doesn’t have a watchdog timer).

I don’t know how to fix that. Can you create a bootable installer and boot into that?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

Mar 26, 2020 4:55 PM in response to jerichod505

You can check the health of the SSD by creating a Knoppix Linux USB drive using Etcher (Mac/Windows/Linux). Option Boot the USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". While Knoppix is booting the computer may appear to be frozen on the Apple boot picker menu so give it lots of time to boot.

At the Knoppix desktop click on the "Start" menu in the lower left corner of the Taskbar and navigate to "System Tools --> GSmartControl". Within the GSmartControl app double-click on the Mini's SSD to access the health report of the SSD. Post the complete health report here. GSmartControl also lets you run the SSD's internal self diagnostics if the SSD supports it. Perform the long/extended test.

Another option would be to reset the SSD to factory defaults if the SSD has a built-in hardware secure erase feature (not all SSDs have this). I've fixed a few weird SSDs using this method. I can provide instructions once we see the health report of the SSD. This requires a Linux utility to perform.

Also see if there are any firmware updates available for your SSD. This can be very difficult since so many SSDs only have Windows only firmware updaters and the firmware revisions are not always easy to locate on the vendor's website.

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Recovery stuck on "examining volumes"