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slow mac

for some time I am having problems with my Mac.

over the course of the past weeks, several times restart in safe mode, PRAM-zapping, etrecheck (see attached), but no solution.

Now etrecheck is reporting "failing harddrive". Possible, but it does seem odd.


Some help is needed here.

thank you in advance.


iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 24, 2020 2:16 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 24, 2020 2:57 PM

I see two major issues.


  1. Your Fusion Drive is split and needs to be refused. It also looks like the 1T HDD has been partitioned into smaller pieces. The problem now is, that you will need to have a good backup of everything, because the SSD and HDD are going to be erased to fix the problem. see > How to fix a split Fusion Drive - Apple Support
  2. Plus you have a lot of MS-ware, Plug-ins and other third party stuff installed on your iMac and you need to ween off anything that you really do not use or need. Don't take it personal, but it pains me when I see folks forcing their Mac's into acting like a widows pc, instead of using the native macOS app's or just using a windows machine.
5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 24, 2020 2:57 PM in response to Jo!

I see two major issues.


  1. Your Fusion Drive is split and needs to be refused. It also looks like the 1T HDD has been partitioned into smaller pieces. The problem now is, that you will need to have a good backup of everything, because the SSD and HDD are going to be erased to fix the problem. see > How to fix a split Fusion Drive - Apple Support
  2. Plus you have a lot of MS-ware, Plug-ins and other third party stuff installed on your iMac and you need to ween off anything that you really do not use or need. Don't take it personal, but it pains me when I see folks forcing their Mac's into acting like a widows pc, instead of using the native macOS app's or just using a windows machine.

Oct 24, 2020 3:09 PM in response to den.thed

thank you for your swift answer.

… odd that the fusion drive is unfused: I had a problem with partitioning it: it could no longer have a partition.

What I did was follow instructions to unfuse it, for that was the only way to repair this.

I thought I did the instructions for refusing it, but apparently this action failed?

I do have good back-ups, there is no problem, other then that it takes a lot of time, which I do not have at the moment. This Mac is my work-horse


What do you mean with MS-ware: you mean microsoft? I do have parallels on the Mac, but I hardly use it.

other MS-software like word and excel I do need occasionally. In all my years of Mac I have never had any problem with that.

If you mean bij third party stuff the small tools that Are installed in the background: they are really very handy things that I use daily.

I do not see how my Mac would look like a windhose-pc?

Oct 24, 2020 3:26 PM in response to Jo!

You have a 120GB SSD and a 1T HDD if you erase and refuse those drives, then it should give you a 1.12+GB Fusion Drive.


I see 708GB for the startup disk and another 405GB that looks like it should be part of the Fusion drive.


disk3s5 - nw

708.08 GB (Shared - 11.59 GB used, 289.83 GB available, 281.61 GB free)

APFS

Mount point: /


disk2 - old

405.62 GB (402.91 GB used, 2.71 GB free)

Journaled HFS+

Mount point: /Volumes/old


So from here, something is not right.

slow mac

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