Best practice to clean and fix system drive - Monterey 12.7.6

My first guess is always to check the health of the internal hard drive. You can use DriveDx (free trial period) to check the health of the hard drive. Post the complete DriveDx text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

If the drive is healthy, then I would check the file system by running Disk Utility First Aid on the hidden Container (or Fusion Drive item if your system uses a Fusion Drive). Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the hidden Container or Fusion Drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Even if the First Aid summary says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll back through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If there are errors, then run First Aid again until they are gone. If after several attempts the errors remain, then you will need to run First Aid from Recovery Mode.

Another possibility is an issue with some third party software. Run the third party app EtreCheck and post the complete report here so we can examine it for possible clues.....assuming you can boot into macOS.

As for cloning the macOS boot drive, it is still possible to do so using SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) at least on Intel Macs (forget about bootable clones on M-series Macs). I don't use Super Duper, but with CCC it requires enabling a "legacy" boot option on the destination in order to make it clone the macOS system volume. Both SD & CCC utilize a macOS command line utility "asr" to actually clone the read-only signed & sealed system volume as that is the only way to keep it signed & sealed.

Reinstalling macOS over top of itself usually doesn't do much on Intel Macs when using macOS 11.x+ because the system volume is now a read-only signed & sealed volume. Sometimes reinstalling macOS over top of itself will make a difference on an M-series Mac because it makes changes to other areas outside of the read-only system volume.

If you are going to perform a clean install by erasing the drive, then make sure to either erase the Fusion Drive item if you system has a Fusion Drive, otherwise erase the whole physical internal drive as GUID partition and APFS (top option). After reinstalling macOS you should be able to restore from your TM backup.

The biggest issue I see is your internal boot drive using a Crucial BX500 SSD. Unfortunately the BX500 series is absolute junk.....sorry, there is no other way to say it. This SSD slows down to a crawl when writing lots of data to it...sometimes as slow as 40MB/s which is like a hard drive. This happens because the SSD's write cache fills up in about 40 seconds, then performance drops quickly....and the more writing that occurs the hotter the SSD becomes which can also slow it down significantly. Once this SSD starts to slow down after filling its write cache, it can take the SSD hours (perhaps longer) before performance may return to advertised levels. If this is not bad enough, this SSD has an extremely high rate of failure. I personally will never touch one....that is how often I've seen them fail completely.

Now, the Crucial MX500 series SSD is perfectly fine (at least it was a few years ago, but all SSD manufacturers now tend to replace the internal SSD components without any notice and without any model number change.....so SSD reviews are now totally worthless.

Unfortunately those macOS installation errors are too cryptic so it is hard to say exactly what is going wrong.

Try running Disk Utility First Aid on the physical SSD first, then on the hidden APFS Container. Actually in your screenshot of Disk Utility....it doesn't actually list the APFS Container properly.....instead of "Container" it is showing as "Apple APFSMedia". I've seen that a few times with some of my organization's Macs. That may actually be part of the problem. Definitely see what First Aid says. Even if the First Aid summary says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll back through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If there are errors, then run First Aid again until they are gone. If after several attempts the errors remain, then try running First Aid while booted into Recovery Mode. If they still remain, then you will need to erase the whole physical SSD followed by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup.

While I doubt the DriveDx report will show much, it would be interesting to see it. Unlike hard drives, an SSD's health report really needs to be manually examined & interpreted. It would not surprise me to see that the SSD is running hot, perhaps it even exceeded its 70ºC critical temp threshold at some point which would not be surprising to me. Use the "Additional Text" feature to post the complete DriveDx text report.

The Kernel Panic shown in the EtreCheck report doesn't contain much, but it does mention a Page Fault which is usually related to bad memory. You can try running the Apple Diagnostic. For a longer more thorough memory test, you can create & use a bootable MemTest86 USB stick (leave it at default settings since I don't know if your iMac is able to work with customized MemTest86 settings). Only a failing condition is useful.

Mike Janowski wrote:

I had the original HDD replaced with an SSD a couple years ago. Can I assume that "APPLE SSD SM0128G Media" is the SSD remnant of the Fusion drive setup, and sort of like a silicon appendix at this point?

Correct.

As to "cloning" that I mentioned, neither SuperDuper nor ChronoSync made a suitable bootable clone. In SD, the comparable function to CCC's legacy boot option is to "Erase, then copy" the backup drive, which in theory makes a clone of the system volume. In practice, neither backup worked as a startup disk.

I believe this should still work on an Intel Mac.

Continued...

Ran EtreCheck. Have a couple of "unsigned" files, mostly older video postproduction software, and some "security " issues. Here's the report:

I'll have to leave the software analysis to other more knowledgeable contributors since I am not a macOS software expert. There are a few items I've never seen before. And you have a lot of other items which are normally Ok, but when you mix them together, then they may start to step on one another's toes....and will definitely impact system performance.

" -1) when restarting in Recovery, and attempting to install Monterey onto the system drive, I get this message: "The operation couldn't be completed (com.apple.BuildInfo.preflight.error error 21.)"

Does this error occur on phase one, or phase two after the system reboots?

Unfortunately Apple's error messages are usually too cryptic. You would be better off looking at the macOS install log to try & figure out what part actually failed. Best to start at the end of the install log and go back looking for the point where the installer started to close things down. Just before that is where you may find a clue.

-2) when attempting to restore from the Time Machine backup, I get an error that states that I can't, and I need to install Monterey on the system drive first."

You can only restore from a TM backup during setup of a clean install of macOS during first boot with Setup Assistant. Or you can use Migration Assistant once you have completed macOS setup of a new macOS user account. TM can no longer be used to restore the OS. The macOS system volume is now located on a signed & sealed read-only APFS volume.

And finally, I've mostly gotten beyond using Chrome, as it seems that it just makes the beach balling problem worse. But that hasn't completely solved the problem.

Perhaps DuckDuckGo is interfering? Turn off or remove any Chrome browser extensions & add-ons. Chrome is known to be a resource hog.....it gets worse the more windows/tabs that are open. You also need to completely Quit Chrome once in a while. Even macOS needs to be rebooted once in a while.

I also saw something about a Firewall in the EtreCheck report blocking some MS apps. The Firewall has been known to cause issues, so you may want to turn it off for testing purposes. Most people have no reason to need a Firewall running on macOS. It may also be part of your macOS installation issues.

And to add insult, EtreCheck seems to want to use Chrome by default...sigh, another support email will be necessary, I guess.

If Chrome is your default browser, then any links within most apps will then utilize that default browser. You can change the default browser back to Safari by modifying the Safari Settings.