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sterlingarcher1999

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 18, 2020
1
0
I wiped the older os with the intention of installing a fresh version of Catalina. I made sure to configure the fusion drive once it was swiped and reformatted it to apfs to support Catalina. Started the installation of Catalina when I noticed at about 3 mins left it moved on to the next step, and has been stuck on the black screen with the apple logo and bar for going on 5hrs. (see pic) From what I've read it has taken some people 12-48 hours for the Install to finally finish. Im just not sure if it's actually doing something or if its frozen. Ive tried using command+L to bring up the time remaining but nothing comes up. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
 

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There was a recall on the 3Tb Seagate drives in most of these. I wouldn't surprise me one bit if the ST3000DM001 drive inside has failed and caused it to stall. Even if they replaced it under the warranty program, the replacement drives are no better.
 
OP:

Jared has a good point.
The internal HDD portion of the fusion drive could be acting up, or failing.

If so, you can STILL get the iMac booted and running.
What I would try:
- Boot to internet recovery (or try the recovery partition, not sure if it will work from the recovery partition)
- Use terminal to DE-fuse the fusion drive -- break it apart into SSD and HDD "standalone" drives.
- Now, install a copy of the OS onto the SSD portion (which I believe is 128gb in this iMac, I could be wrong).
- 128gb is plenty large enough to hold the OS, applications, and "trimmed down" accounts.

Set it up this way, and you can still boot and run from the SSD (only), and it should run quite fast.

I would try to erase the HDD. If it's flaky, just "let it be" -- sitting there spinning, but erased.
Use external USB3 storage for your large libraries of stuff -- movies, music, pics.
 
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