You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Problem restoring an apple imac 2019 with fusion drive

I am trying to fix an iMac 2019 fusion model that will not complete a restore of Monterey OS. Originally it had a 1 TB hard drive and the 32 Gb SSD, all original.

I made a bootable flash drive with Monterey it from another iMac identical to the one I am trying to fix.

I had some indication that this iMac was developing an issue booting up so I made a Time Machine backup that is current.

A few days later it stopped booting up. Nothing I tried would allow me to restore it. I tried the online restore and the flash drive restore. I cant get to the disk utility to do anything with it.

Does anyone know what I can do to get to the disk utility?

I ran the D diagnostics and it found nothing wrong.

Without all the history I decided to replace the 1TB drive with an SSD since I know they can fail frequently. It still would not restore.

I thought the 32 Gb SSD could be bad so I replaced it. That didn't work either.

It starts to run the restore then stops and says there was an error and it needs to restart the restore again.

I am mostly experienced with PC's. Is there something I need to do to create the fusion pairing again before I run restore?

Do I need to have that 32 GB SSD there at all to do a restore?

Currently it just has the 1TB SSD hooked up on the cable where the old mechanical drive was.

Posted on Aug 20, 2022 4:13 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 21, 2022 3:06 AM

Remember that a Fusion Drive is a hybrid drive with the firmware managing the disk operations. If either the SSD part or the HDD fails then the whole Fusion Drive fails.


What I suggest is installing a fresh copy of MacOS on an external USB and use that as your boot drive.

Similar questions

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 21, 2022 3:06 AM in response to jwarcher1

Remember that a Fusion Drive is a hybrid drive with the firmware managing the disk operations. If either the SSD part or the HDD fails then the whole Fusion Drive fails.


What I suggest is installing a fresh copy of MacOS on an external USB and use that as your boot drive.

Aug 21, 2022 6:04 PM in response to Mal-S

Thank you for responding to my challenging issue with the iMac.

It came up one time and I was able to run the disk utilities.

I now have the fusion paired drives formatted and working.

For some reason when I try to install Monterey it does not finish from either option I used, the Internet or a bootable flash drive with Monterey on it.

It will go so far and then it brings up a message that your computer restarted because of a problem, press a key to restart or wait.

I ran diagnostics and no issues were found.

What do you suggest I try next? Or do you think I have a board problem.

Problem restoring an apple imac 2019 with fusion drive

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.