What does 'recovery' mean - & how do I do it ?

ziggyzig wrote:

I was advised to run disc utility first aid as a routine maintenance function in my late 2023 iMac 21.5 inch OS 10:13:6 High Sierra. I did and it resulted in a message saying corruption found & I need to run disc first aid in recovery.

Do you mean Late 2013? The only Late 2023 iMac is the 24" M3 iMac that Apple just announced. You can order it now, but the Apple Web site says that it won't be available until tomorrow.

A 21.5" Late 2013 iMac (if that is what you have) would have originally shipped with some version of Mountain Lion or Mavericks, and theoretically would be able to upgrade as far as Catalina (which breaks 32-bit applications).

I have absolutely no idea what this 'recovery' is. What is wrong with software people being so unable to communicate with the end user ?

Recovery mode is a special startup mode that lets you start up from a special, hidden, Recovery partition, instead of from a normal startup volume on an internal or external drive. Its purpose is to let you try to recover – therefore the name – if your internal startup volume gets messed-up.

It's not really possible to do extensive repairs on a startup disk that is actively in use, any more than you could carry out extensive repairs on a running car engine. That's why you have to start up the computer in another way – using an external drive, or using the Recovery partition.

Once in Recovery mode, you can run Disk First Aid on the startup volume.

You can also attempt more drastic forms of recovery, such as erasing the startup drive (which will erase all of your data; hopefully you were keeping backups!) and trying to re-install macOS from the Internet.

Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support

Here you go: How to repair a Mac disk with Disk Utility - Apple Support. Follow the numbered steps.

... my late 2023 iMac 21.5 inch

Your question is a little confusing to me since there is no such model. If it is a 21.5 inch model iMac, the steps for the Intel processor are applicable. There are no 21.5 inch Apple silicon iMacs.

Identify your iMac model - Apple Support

What is wrong with software people being so unable to communicate with the end user ?

English isn't a programming language 😄

👍

Were you able to boot macOS Recovery and perform the disk repair?

How to repair a Mac disk with Disk Utility - Apple Support

NO ! I had my computer data completely destroyed. And I now have to reply to you as a new user as I cannot log into my original Ziggyzig account here so had to create the new Ziggyzig1 account.

The following is what happened, posted in the new Ziggyzig1 account.

Using my late 2013 iMac in OS 10.13.6 High Sierra I was advised to use disc first aid as a routine check - even though the computer was functioning adequately. I had not previously used disc first aid in the eight years of using this iMac. Disc first aid informed me there was minor corruption on the hard disc and then repaired that successfully. It then informed me to turn the iMac off & then turn power back on & re-boot to open my desktop. 

Instead of the iMac re-booting from the existing High Sierra OS already within the iMac it posted a message saying it could not recognise the Apple server where it had intended getting a new version of High Sierra.

I now had a computer with no operating system & therefore it could not produce my desktop as it was permamnetly stuck with a blank black screen with just the Apple logo and a progress bar completed but frozen. Even after leaving it for at least eight hours overnight nothing changed.

Apple support told me to take it to an Apple store for them to sort it out. I did & the Apple store loaded OS 10.13.6 High Sierra back onto my computer but told me when they did that they discovered there was no information at all on the computer except that new OS High Sierra.

Although I was concerned about this bizarre turn of events I expected to be able to retrieve all my information as I always kept daily back ups using time machine and an external hard disc.

When I then used the Apple migration assistant to migrate the backup from my external backup hardisc but it uploaded a very  old backup that was useless. It then did the same with a second backup disc I had. It then became clear the iMac was not correctly reading either of the two external backup discs. I have spent the entire five days since this disaster commenced on Saturday November 11th until Thursday November 17th on the phone to numerous Apple support people who had given conflicting, inadequate & useless information. 

A vast amount of time was spent by them telling me High Sierra was obsolete & therefore  I should expect problems like this and that Apple support was unable to help me as I was at fault for failing to constantly 

upgrade my OS. I was  also told that my eight year old late 2013 iMac was also 'obsolete' and that Apple expected it to be un-usable as that computer hardware was also 'obsolete' the same as the OS High Sierra.

I am completely incredulous at what has happened and have been on the phone for many, many hours & told by Apple Support that nothing can be done to discover what is wrong, how it happend & why, and also why my two external backup discs cannot be read properly by the computer which then means I cannot retrieve my latest backup.

Does anyone else recorgnise this problem and know how to go about solving it as the loss of all my information has just about destroyed my life, preventring me working or doing anything at all.

The shambles I experienced from Apple support has already incurred huge phone bills and a large expense paying a fee to an Apple store to do absolutely nothing useful at all except installing an OS but losing all my data.

And a persistent thread of advice from these Apple support people has been their specific instruction to me that any purchase of any brand new computer only has a life of about seven years before becoming 'obsolete' and unsafe/potentially useless to use. I was also consistently told any computer or back-up of data cannot be relied on to function and all data can be permanently lost at any time.

Can any one suggest what I might be able to do about this ?

Ziggyzig1 wrote:

And a persistent thread of advice from these Apple support people has been their specific instruction to me that any purchase of any brand new computer only has a life of about seven years before becoming 'obsolete' and unsafe/potentially useless to use.

That may be related to Apple's policies regarding availability of parts and hardware repair service.

• "Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago."
• "Products are considered obsolete when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago. Apple discontinues all hardware service for obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products. Mac laptops may be eligible for an extended battery-only repair period for up to 10 years from when the product was last distributed for sale, subject to parts availability."

In many parts of the world, your chances of getting spare parts or repair service for a "Vintage" Mac are about as good as getting them for an "Obsolete" Mac.

Obtaining service for your Apple product after an expired warranty - Apple Support

I was also consistently told any computer or back-up of data cannot be relied on to function and all data can be permanently lost at any time.

Any storage device can catastrophically fail, be taken out by a fire or natural disaster, or be stolen along with your computer by a burglar. That's one of the reasons why it's good to keep backups, and to keep at least one off-site. Then you get into paranoia about "How do you know that your backup is good? That you will be able to rely on it when you need it?"

It does sound like you were rather unlucky in that you had two backups and couldn't restore data from either.

Instead of the iMac re-booting from the existing High Sierra OS already within the iMac it posted a message saying it could not recognise the Apple server where it had intended getting a new version of High Sierra.

That is a known problem, and it is a fairly recent one. It is beyond your control to fix.

For reasons known only to them, or perhaps unknown to them, Apple quietly shut down or otherwise made unavailable any means of restoring High Sierra from its Recovery servers.

And a persistent thread of advice from these Apple support people has been their specific instruction to me that any purchase of any brand new computer only has a life of about seven years before becoming 'obsolete' and unsafe/potentially useless to use.

That's demonstrably false since I am using an even older Mac right now to respond to you. It works just fine, and so does Time Machine. In fact Time Machine would be the only way to reinstall its version of High Sierra, since Apple took down their Recovery server for HS back in June (approximately). More recent macOS versions don't get backed up with Time Machine.

There is nothing wrong with your 2013 Mac either, other than the fact you can't seem to populate its contents from a Time Machine backup recent enough to be considered useful.

Regarding that remaining problem all I can do is speculate which won't do you any good. Unscrambling that egg will be difficult to impossible.

As I understand it, Apple was able to reinstall High Sierra, but the result is that your Mac is essentially blank, and you are unable to restore any recent backups. Are you quite certain that booting Recovery, and choosing "Restore a Time Machine" backup does not reveal anything more recent that you can use? Apologies for asking you to reiterate something you already described, but if those two backups are the only ones you have then the question sort of answers itself.

You have no idea of how grateful I am to you for your reply - not because it solves the computer problem as such, but because it restores my sanity by confirming precisely what I suspected in the first place. The Apple software support people just gave me brain damage & reduced my brain to porridge with the hours of unhelpful repetitive wittering garbage these sorts of phone calls involve.

And what you say makes complete sense in terms of what happened now !

I have just spent most of today checking the computer hard disc with disc aid again on the advice from Western Digital, makers of the external hard discs as they explained bad sectors on a damaged hard disc could cause problems. I also used disc aid to check all four volumes of the two backup discs I have with backups on. Disc aid reported all discs as being OK. I have also upgraded from High Sierra to Catalina on the advice of the Apple support people who assure me Catalina will still access my data - not what I understood from a previous experience ten-ish years ago when I was made to understsnd you had to use the same OS as the computer used immediately prior to the OS being trashed.

I then managed to mount tthe second volume of the backup disc which had previously beein unmounted and the Apple support people failed to understand that or tell me that all you had to do was remount it via disc aid. This, I think, is the correct volume my most recent back up should be on.

But having now mounted it and seeing there is a backup.backups folder on there saying the latest backup is Nov 1st 2023 which must be my latest backup as I remember stopping doing backups at about that time, intending to buy another new external hardisc for newer backups and leaving the existing two hard discs unused & just archived in case of future need, I cannot find the usual collection of 'backup' folders with their dates on to see what the range of dates is there.

I then noticed an icon saying it was a backup in progress. Presumably I or someone/something has interrupted a backup on November 17th which it was dated with. This struck me as a possible cause of my latest backup not being restored as it should have been. So I then instructed Time Machine to commence a back up right now and it is still progressing very, very slowly. It started telling me it would take 14 hours at midnight when I started it & it has been going two hours & now tells me it has eight hours still to go.

The Time Machine tells me it is backing up 195.69 GB in total, but has only managed 29.85 GB in the past two hours.

I suspect when it completes I may then be able to see inside the backups folder to see all the dated latest backup icons which should start from early 2023 up to what that icon already says is the latest backup on Nov 1st 2023. This is the backup set I need. And `I had already realised before reading your reply that it might be a bright iidea to boot in Recovcery to re-install via the disc utility as you suggest. I have a hunch this might work.

So now I'm going to treat myself to a couple of glasses of South African Pinotage, a meal and go to bed hoping to see the current backup completed in the morning when I will see what disc aid has to say about re-installing from it. If it does, all this is a demonstration of how useless Apple support is as they seem to be clueless about how Apple software functions.

And about eleven years ago I had another saga of complete nonsense unhelpful 'support' which prevented me using my computer for three months and all that it needed was the re-installation of the Tiger OS to enable it to function with all it's existing data which was still on the computer so did not need re-installing from any backup. What had happened was a purely malicious hacker who had physical access to that computer had cleverly taken a key part of the OS out of it's correct folder within the system OS and hidden it instead on the desktop. When that ended up being put in the trash as it was hidden and appeared to be rubbish, it then trashed the whole OS.

The completely astonishing thing about the Apple support people is they kept on telling me they could not locate a version of the Tiger OS and so I could not then access any data on the computer until Tiger OS was loaded onto it. Eventually the Tiger OS was loaded onto the computer by some computer repair people I took the computer to. A part of the story is that Apple had asked me to pay their bill & they would re-imburse me but they never did. They never disputed that they should not pay it but just endlessly fobbed me off and they still never have paid me more than ten years later. The amount was about three hundred pounds then which would be equivalent to about £12 000 in today's money as my savings invested in various stocks & shares average about 15% return yearly, meaning the amount of money saved doubles about every five years; ergo -£300/£600/£1200 now !

Once again, many thanks for your help,

!Nick

Ziggyzig1 wrote:

And about eleven years ago I had another saga of complete nonsense unhelpful 'support' which prevented me using my computer for three months and all that it needed was the re-installation of the Tiger OS to enable it to function with all it's existing data which was still on the computer so did not need re-installing from any backup. What had happened was a purely malicious hacker who had physical access to that computer had cleverly taken a key part of the OS out of it's correct folder within the system OS and hidden it instead on the desktop. When that ended up being put in the trash as it was hidden and appeared to be rubbish, it then trashed the whole OS.

The completely astonishing thing about the Apple support people is they kept on telling me they could not locate a version of the Tiger OS and so I could not then access any data on the computer until Tiger OS was loaded onto it.

Back in the Tiger days, Apple did not distribute operating systems electronically (other than to pre-install them on hard drives). When you bought a Mac, it came with CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs to use if you needed to reinstall Mac OS X.

One special thing about Tiger: It was the first version of Mac OS X to run on Intel-based Macs. There were never any retail Tiger kits that supported Intel-based Macs. Apple only shipped Tiger for Intel on early Intel-based Macs and on the recovery discs that came with those Macs. The retail Tiger kits were PowerPC-only.

Presumably an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Repair shop would have access to Tiger for Intel installation discs that were not sold separately to the general public. But who knows? Maybe they didn't have / couldn't figure out how to get the discs, and that's why they wanted to put it on you to find a copy of the OS …

Thank you for your kind words Nick.

The Apple software support people just gave me brain damage & reduced my brain to porridge with the hours of unhelpful repetitive wittering garbage these sorts of phone calls involve.

Sure, but I can't imagine how they cope with most of the calls they get. One would think concerns such as yours would be out of their ordinary routine — the "I forgot my password" sort of problems — that would inspire more interest on their part. But who knows.

I imagine almost no one at Apple even remembers Tiger any more. That's what we're here for. Several experienced ASC helpers have a depth of knowledge that far exceeds anyone at Apple.

You have a 2023 iMac running macOS version 10? You might want to check that little fact.