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jwarcher1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Problem restoring an apple imac 2019 with fusion drive

I am trying to fix an iMac 2019 fusion model that will not complete a restore of Monterey OS. Originally it had a 1 TB hard drive and the 32 Gb SSD, all original.

I made a bootable flash drive with Monterey it from another iMac identical to the one I am trying to fix.

I had some indication that this iMac was developing an issue booting up so I made a Time Machine backup that is current.

A few days later it stopped booting up. Nothing I tried would allow me to restore it. I tried the online restore and the flash drive restore. I cant get to the disk utility to do anything with it.

Does anyone know what I can do to get to the disk utility?

I ran the D diagnostics and it found nothing wrong.

Without all the history I decided to replace the 1TB drive with an SSD since I know they can fail frequently. It still would not restore.

I thought the 32 Gb SSD could be bad so I replaced it. That didn't work either.

It starts to run the restore then stops and says there was an error and it needs to restart the restore again.

I am mostly experienced with PC's. Is there something I need to do to create the fusion pairing again before I run restore?

Do I need to have that 32 GB SSD there at all to do a restore?

Currently it just has the 1TB SSD hooked up on the cable where the old mechanical drive was.

Posted on Aug 20, 2022 4:13 PM

Top-ranking reply

Mal-S

Level 5

4,996 points

Posted on Aug 21, 2022 3:06 AM

Remember that a Fusion Drive is a hybrid drive with the firmware managing the disk operations. If either the SSD part or the HDD fails then the whole Fusion Drive fails.

What I suggest is installing a fresh copy of MacOS on an external USB and use that as your boot drive.

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Problem restoring an apple imac 2019 with fusion drive

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