My HD crashed on my iMac. I booted with Ctrl-R and tried to repair disk, but it failed. Rebooted with Ctrl-R and erased the disk, attempting to restore from Time Machine. It was working great initially, but now has been stuck at 83.6% for over 12 hours. I'm guessing it is hung. Do I have to force a restart and start all over? Do I need to choose a different backup date?
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
I restarted with Cmd-R and chose an earlier backup. That one got an error restoring. I went to yet an earlier backup and that one finally completed.
Well, my system crashed and I suspected my hard disk was corrupted. It is a desk top. Nothing fell or had any physical impact, so I suspect it was corruption.
I restarted with Cmd-R and restored from an earlier date. It restored fully. It took a day for Spotlight to re-index things, so it was initially slow, but I have been using it with Photoshop daily for about 5 days now.
CindyLV wrote:
Well, my system crashed and I suspected my hard disk was corrupted. It is a desk top. Nothing fell or had any physical impact, so I suspect it was corruption.
There doesn't need to be any physical impact for a hard disk to fail. A nine-year old iMac's hard disk will surely be tired and near failure, if not already.
For this reason, please run & upload a DriveDx report of your hard disk or Fusion Drive. That way, we can properly evaluate your Mac and provide suggestions:
How to use DriveDx - Apple Community.
Jack
CindyLV wrote:
Well, I guess I'm not certain what you mean by "crashed".
No one here can know anything more than what you wrote:
CindyLV wrote:
My HD crashed on my iMac.
Using accurate terminology would help. From what you initially described, the Mac's hard disk drive failed.
Hard disk drives that have failed cannot be repaired, although Disk Utility will perform a cursory "repair" which does little more than correcting directory errors that should not have occurred to begin with.
That hard disk drive is now operating in a state of failure. It is 100% certain to fail again. You can certainly erase it again, restore its content from a Time Machine backup again, and repeat as often as required, until you are no longer willing to tolerate it.
I STRONGLY recommend that you download the free version of DriveDX and run it on your HD. If any errors appear that means the HD is failing and MUST be replaced!!!! Ensure you are backing up which it seems you are, if your HD is failing then you want to ensure you have the most up-to-date backup possible so when you get the HD replaced (get yourself an external SSD!!!!!) you can use the Time Machine to restore your data.
If the HD crashed it MUST be replaced, a repair will not fix a crashed drive. Consider an external SSD to replace the HD.
While you are welcome to try things like DriveDX, in my opinion justification for doing so amounts to morbid curiosity. It will only confirm what you already know — the drive is operating in a state of failure.
There is no concern using a hard disk drive in that condition, provided of course you have reliable backups — plural, as in more than just one. Any drive can fail for any reason at any time, or for no reason whatsoever. Same goes for backup drives. Two or more reduces the risk of simultaneous, catastrophic, total data loss to an acceptable minimum.
Eventually, a hard disk drive will become unacceptably slow and / or the Time Machine restorations you need to perform become unacceptably frequent. That is one of a hard disk's few advantages — they usually give you ample notice of their impending demise. That one is on its way out.
Well, I guess I'm not certain what you mean by "crashed". Perhaps it was just corrupted. It ran really slow all of a sudden, so I did a hard reset. Then It turned itself off when I tried to boot it and after CTRL-R, it wouldn't repair with disk utility. Another reboot said it would erase it and restore from a backup. So how do I know if it was corrupted or whatever you mean by "Crashed"? and must be replaced?
If I do replace it, must it be the same type for a Time Machine backup to work? I'm installing an old release as I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS6 and it won't work on newer releases.
Hello!
What version of macOS are you using? What year is your iMac?
Jack
It is an iMac, late 2013, I believe. It was running Mavericks.
My HD crashed. Full Restore from Time Machine is stuck at 83.6% for over 12 hours.
