iMac Fusion Failure Help

[TomApey]

Hi,

I have a 2017 iMac with the fusion drive. A couple weeks ago, I tried to restart because it was acting slowly, and in doing so everything froze. After forcing a restart, I got the circle with a line through it when trying to boot.

I have a partition for both OSX and windows 10. I can hold option to get to the drive select screen, choose either drive, but still get the error loading. I can NOT boot into disc manager/utility... it just hangs indefinitely on the status bar screen. When I try booting from a flash drive with OS X, the drive doesn’t show up as a choice. Loading OS from WiFi is impossible due to dialup connection speeds (we live in the boonies).

TL/DR: fusion iMac won’t boot I’d like to try and recover the data off of the hdd portion of the drive. I have a 2019 MBA. Is there any way I can configure the iMac so I can access the contents of the hdd from the MBA without being able to load any diagnostic screens?

 

[pldelisle]

Hi,

I have a 2017 iMac with the fusion drive. A couple weeks ago, I tried to restart because it was acting slowly, and in doing so everything froze. After forcing a restart, I got the circle with a line through it when trying to boot.

I have a partition for both OSX and windows 10. I can hold option to get to the drive select screen, choose either drive, but still get the error loading. I can NOT boot into disc manager/utility... it just hangs indefinitely on the status bar screen. When I try booting from a flash drive with OS X, the drive doesn’t show up as a choice. Loading OS from WiFi is impossible due to dialup connection speeds (we live in the boonies).

TL/DR: fusion iMac won’t boot I’d like to try and recover the data off of the hdd portion of the drive. I have a 2019 MBA. Is there any way I can configure the iMac so I can access the contents of the hdd from the MBA without being able to load any diagnostic screens?

You could try https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201462

 

[TomApey]

You could try https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201462

When I try this, I get a grey thunderbolt arrow with a circle around it that slowly moves around the screen.

 

[pldelisle]

Maybe because it can’t detect a connection to another computer via thunderbolt?
I never had to make this because I have this as everybody in this world should have: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201250

 

[Fishrrman]

Can you boot to INTERNET recovery?
Command-OPTION-R

What version of the OS were you using before it failed?

Do you have a backup?

 

[pldelisle]

Can you boot to INTERNET recovery?
Command-OPTION-R

What version of the OS were you using before it failed?

Do you have a backup?

Loading OS from WiFi is impossible due to dialup connection speeds (we live in the boonies).

 

[TomApey]

condition has deteriorated. It won’t even get through to the disk select screen. Guessing bad motherboard? Going to pull the HDD and go from there.

yes, have a backup, but it’s a few months old.

 

[TomApey]

And I tried to use WiFi just to see. It let me get as far as seeing available networks but wouldn’t let me enter a password (every time I clicked the box it flashed the screen and the mouse movement was jerky).

 

[pldelisle]

And I tried to use WiFi just to see. It let me get as far as seeing available networks but wouldn’t let me enter a password (every time I clicked the box it flashed the screen and the mouse movement was jerky).

Can you boot into the Test partition : https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202731

 

[TomApey]

Can you boot into the Test partition : https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202731

I had tried initially and it didn’t work, but I hadn’t removed all external devices. I’ll try that again.