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scorpio333

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 11, 2008
87
4
Let's get the obvious out of the way, I messed up, bad. Over the weekend my daily machine (Mid 2012 3.33) started giving me beach balls every few seconds. Without thinking I did a NVRAM reset three times. Everything got crazy after that. Couldn't boot to Big Sur any longer. Removed all drives from the machine and put in an old Mojave backup and it booted fine. Thinking that I junked the EFI partition, I tried to mount it to take a look or get lucky with a rebless. It will NOT mount using Terminal, Clover, or OpenCore Configurator while booted into Mojave. Grabbed my daughter's Mini running Big Sur and plugged the bad BS drive in. The Data drive mounts and unmounts over and over. Again, cannot mount that EFI partition. At this point I believe the drive (Samsung 870 EVO) is possibly bad/damaged/corrupt which may have been causing the initial beachball issues.

I do have Time Machine backups. I'm not able to pull any of the data off BS drive in Mojave. Like everyone else, I got a million things to do and this wasn't one of them. I'm getting frustrated and not thinking straight. Should I get a new SSD and start over from scratch? Then restore Time Machine? I've honestly never used Time Machine, been lucky not to need it. Any help with what direction to go would be very appreciated!

One thing is for sure, I'll be documenting the process. I've been running this setup for three yrs without an issue (other than USB issues here n there) and I can't honestly remember how I got from Mojave to BS! Getting old sucks!
 

joevt

macrumors 604
Jun 21, 2012
6,966
4,260
Boot linux and do ddrescue from the old drive to a disk image file. Include a map file in the ddrescue command line to track progress and bad blocks.
 

scorpio333

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 11, 2008
87
4
Replaced the drive, used OCLP to install BS and Time Machine to migrate data. Everything looks ok and no more beachballs. As for the 870 EVO, I tried to Erase it with Disk Utility and that failed. Since I don't need any info from the drive I'll try a couple things before pitching it.
 
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