iMac rotational drive failure

Here's what I would do:

1 - if your iMac can still boot into the SSD portion of the Fusion drive do so.

2 - buy an external SSD with enough space to house your system and user data.

3 - use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your system portion to the external SSD..

4 - the first time you boot from the SSD make sure your Time Machine backup drive is connected.

5 - use Migration Assistant to migrate your user data to the new boot drive.

FWIW I recommend using OWC (MacSales.com) external SSDs as OWC is considered by most here to be the premier hardware supplier for Macs. Call OWC's Customer Support and see which of their several units would be most suitable for your particular Mac model, your workflow and budget.

Taking Apple on in court is a definite possibility; do that then come back in about five years and tell us how it's going and how much it's cost you to date. Inquiring minds want to know.

Other than that, $100US and an external SSD to boot from will fix the situation right away. Assuming you have recent backups you're good to go.

Apologies for stating the obvious, but I would ask your local Apple Authorized Service Provider what the options are.

Agreed, but my suggestion would be to e-mail an Authorized Service Provider, explain the problem, and ask for their solution and the cost. In my case, I did not have a failure, just wanted to speed up a 2017 Fusion Drive, but I was quite surprised to find the labor cost was less than a couple of hours. The "Apple" SSD cost a bit more. The external SSD may be a good solution.

The best option is to have the drive replace, preferably with an SSD. I would suggest you do it yourself, but based on your post, I’d be surprised if you could manage that without completely borking the machine.

You should probably check your attitude as well.

+1 for the external SSD.

+1² for the legal issue.