iMac retina 27" 2019 hard drive

[bengybe]

Hello,

I need your advices. I have one imac with fusiondrive which does'nt boot anymore with the crossed circle sign and the url from support apple. If I boot on recovery with cmd+R and try to reinstall macos I have no disk proposed to make the installation.

With disk utility I can see the SSD part of the fusion drive and another one on wich I can't do anything, which is labelled as 4Gb as it is a 2TB rotational disk...I can't make any repair on it, even erase it...

With diskutil I have :

Guess disk1 would have been the 2TB rotational disk (even if on other imac with same conf it is disk0).

It's dead isn't it ? If you have anything more to try, I'm listening...

I also tried to boot the mac on 2 different external drive and after one night waiting I gave up, which I don't understand why by the way !

Thanx

 

[Fishrrman]

"With disk utility I can see the SSD part of the fusion drive and another one on wich I can't do anything, which is labelled as 4Gb as it is a 2TB rotational disk...I can't make any repair on it, even erase it..."

That sounds like the HDD portion of the fusion drive may have failed on you.

It looks like you still have the 128gb SSD portion operational.

I hope you have some kind of backup, otherwise the data that was on the drives may be lost for good.

Have you tried booting to INTERNET recovery?
This is NOT THE SAME as "the recovery partition"
Try:
Command-OPTION-R
at boot.

If you connect via wifi, you'll also need your wifi password.
The internet utilities take a while to load, be patient as the globe spins.

When you get to the utilities, try disk utility again, and see what it can do.
IMPORTANT -- go to the view menu and choose "show all devices".

If you can get booted to internet recovery, you can install the OS onto an EXTERNAL drive, and get booted that way.

It's very important that you at least try this.
Getting booted "to the finder" gives you options you don't have "in recovery".

Get booted to internet recovery, then...
- connect an external drive
- format/erase it to APFS (if you're using high sierra or earlier, try Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
- open the installer and start clicking through
- when you get to the part where it asks WHERE to install, select the EXTERNAL drive
- let the install go through, then set up a simple account (username and password is "all you need").
Can you get booted again by doing this?

How I'd get the iMac going again:
- If the 4tb HDD is not "revivable", I'd just leave it "dead, but in place".
- I'd set up the 128gb SSD to become "the new boot drive". I'd keep it "lean and clean" with the OS, apps, and basic accounts. This drive should be a relatively fast "booter", being a blade SSD.
- I'd put together an nvme "blade" SSD with a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure, attach that to the USBc port, and it would become my "data storage" drive (for things like data, movies, music, pics, etc.).