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Level 2

260 points

Apple Hardware Test and Disk Utility shortcomings

Is it possible for Hardware Test and Disk Utility to not recognize a hard drive that is failing?

I am troubleshooting my nephew's iMac Late 2013 with Fusion Drive. It's a Mac I'm very familiar with because I gave it to him last October, 2019 for schoolwork. It's had 3 logic board replacements (had 2 defective ones). Logic board finally good 2 months ago. Now, the iMac is not booting up. Gets as far as Apple logo and no progress bar.

Ran Apple Hardware Test; no issues found. Disk Utility Repair; status appears to be OK. Meanwhile, I can hear some very faint clicking noises coming from the hard drive. My guess is it's on its last legs.

Trying to reinstall MacOS from recovery; took awhile to get to the install screen but I'm there now and says it's installing. Red flag = says 35 hours to install??? I cancelled.

Booted up from and SSD backup. Everything is working fine; system is even "snappier". I'm 99% sure the Fusion Drive is kaput.

Anyway, back to my question. If Apple Hardware Test can't diagnose anything wrong -- cause it never diagnosed the 2 defective logic boards either -- what good is it as a troubleshooting tool and how are we to rely on it for useful information?

Ugh, just my rant for the day. Thanks for listening! LOL.

Posted on Sep 8, 2020 5:13 PM

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macboyinsf Author

Level 2

260 points

Posted on Sep 8, 2020 11:04 PM

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I was having a frustrating day. I’m the “tech support guy” for my friends and family. You know how that goes.

Gonna check out DriveDX too! I’ll add that to my troubleshooting arsenal. 🙏🏽👍🏽

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macboyinsf Author

Level 2

260 points

Sep 8, 2020 11:04 PM in response to HWTech

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I was having a frustrating day. I’m the “tech support guy” for my friends and family. You know how that goes.

Gonna check out DriveDX too! I’ll add that to my troubleshooting arsenal. 🙏🏽👍🏽

HWTech

Level 9

56,900 points

Sep 8, 2020 6:56 PM in response to macboyinsf

I believe your diagnosis of a failing hard drive is correct. All the symptoms you describe are consistent with a drive failure.

The Apple Hardware Test isn't able to detect many hard drive failures. Disk Utility is only made for partitioning/formatting drives and repairing the file system. Disk Utility doesn't perform any hardware checks of the hard drive.

If you want to check the health of a drive, then use an app such as DriveDx. While DriveDx usually interprets hard drive health fairly correctly, DriveDx doesn't do a good job of assessing the health of an SSD. You can use the health report DriveDx pulls from the drive itself to manually assess the health of an SSD (but it takes practice and good understanding about how the SSD hardware is meant to work since reallocated blocks for an SSD is not necessarily a death sentence for a drive like it usually is for a hard drive).

Apple Hardware Test and Disk Utility shortcomings