Big Jim
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 183
- Location
- Derbyshire, UK
2019 iMac with a 500GB WD Blue SA510 SSD in it.
customer had an issue with crashing/freezing then "something" happened and the customer followed instructions online and now it is booting to a flashing folder icon.
Before carrying out any work we have cloned both the internal drive and the time machine drive using macrium (although macrium can't see the partitions it does appear to clone mac drives just fine in our experience)
however in this case both clones are not mountable/readable in another mac or linux machine.
the original time machine drive is a 2TB WD Elements portable, relatively new and not making any weird noises, I was able to browse it on another mac and although it showed 400GB used space the user folder was empty.
I then booted the customers machine from it and rather than going to a recovery menu like I have seen in the past it booted to mac setup (as if it were a new machine) once the setup was done (no data transfer option selected) it booted to mac OS but only finder would load all icons along the bottom bar were "?"
I rebooted the machine as it was not usable and now the mac shows the circle with a line through it when I attempt to boot from the time machine drive again.
Also the drive will not show up on another mac at all now (even in disk utility), when I attempted to reboot our mac with the time machine drive attached it stuck on black screen until I unplugged it.
As this is an iMac i haven't opened it up yet to remove the internal drive to check it, wanting to see what other options we have before we do that.
customer had an issue with crashing/freezing then "something" happened and the customer followed instructions online and now it is booting to a flashing folder icon.
Before carrying out any work we have cloned both the internal drive and the time machine drive using macrium (although macrium can't see the partitions it does appear to clone mac drives just fine in our experience)
however in this case both clones are not mountable/readable in another mac or linux machine.
the original time machine drive is a 2TB WD Elements portable, relatively new and not making any weird noises, I was able to browse it on another mac and although it showed 400GB used space the user folder was empty.
I then booted the customers machine from it and rather than going to a recovery menu like I have seen in the past it booted to mac setup (as if it were a new machine) once the setup was done (no data transfer option selected) it booted to mac OS but only finder would load all icons along the bottom bar were "?"
I rebooted the machine as it was not usable and now the mac shows the circle with a line through it when I attempt to boot from the time machine drive again.
Also the drive will not show up on another mac at all now (even in disk utility), when I attempted to reboot our mac with the time machine drive attached it stuck on black screen until I unplugged it.
As this is an iMac i haven't opened it up yet to remove the internal drive to check it, wanting to see what other options we have before we do that.