Dying iMac

[Jonathan Brady]

Good evening all.

I have an iMac circa 2013 21.5” running macOS 10.15.7. with a fusion drive. Of late it has been slowing down and I have been looking to replace it with a refurb iMac of similar size and spec. At the moment, however, it is struggling to boot up. The opening screen with the apple logo and progress bar take roughly 15-30 minutes to reach the login screen. When I enter my login details, the mouse cursor becomes the spinning beach ball for another ten or so minutes before the iMac reboots itself and the process continues. I have unplugged all usb devices and also forced a shut down using the power button, disconnected and reconnected the power supply and restarted - but to no avail. The reboot/login loop continues.

Am I witnessing the death of my iMac? Fortunately, I have a time machine backup which I was going to use to setup the replacement iMac with.

Any suggestions on how to break the reboot/login loop would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Jonathan Brady
laddy...@gmail.com

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Hi Jonathan 

Fusion Drives, or anything with a spinning disk component, and a version of macOS beyond Mojave will run unbearably slowly. The new APFS disk format is great, but only on solid state drives. Performance is absolutely miserable on spinning disk drives. This made worse by Apple reducing the SSD portion of the Fusion Drives down to 24GB, so while your Mac technically has a Fusion Drive, the vast majority of it is spinning disk.

You could replace the spinning disk part of the Fusion Drive with an SSD, it involves backing up your data, replacing the drive, rebuilding a new Fusion Drive and restoring your data. I’ve upgraded a lot of Fusion Drives recently and the Macs run faster than the day they were bought.

The slow startup is most likely down to a bad sector on the spinning disk drive, so while the Fusion Drive’s able to read the directory stored on the SSD, it could be experiencing drive faults reading from the spinning disk. Do you have a recent backup? If yes, your best bet is to install the SSD and restore from that.

_

Regards Sam Mullen +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.com www.macambulance.com MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development

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[Jonathan Brady]

Thanks Sam. 

Are you free for a chat today, please?

Jonathan Brady

laddy...@gmail.com

Tel: +447931541489

On 31 Aug 2022, at 07:20, Sam - MacAmbulance <in...@macambulance.com> wrote:

Hi Jonathan 

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/BE938BFD-C1DC-458B-B1E5-BB18649491DA%40macambulance.com.