It’s an ex-parrot.īecause I’m paranoid that way, I booted from my bootable duplicate (which worked, thankfully), and then set it to update yet another bootable duplicate backup I have on yet another hard disk. That was the first suggestion that the SSD was dead, and indeed, once I could look at the setup with Disk Utility again, it was missing entirely and hasn’t shown up since. Not good.Īfter I forcibly restarted the Mac, it wouldn’t even boot into macOS Recovery, instead loading Internet Recovery. After dinner, I checked on it, and it was 61.6% done, which seemed slow, and when I checked several hours later, it was still at 61.6%. I knew this was going to take a lot of time, and the initial 4-hour estimate kept going up until it was at about 10 hours. While still in macOS Recovery, I quit Disk Utility and started to restore from my Time Machine backup. However, when I set the View pop-up menu in Disk Utility to Show All Devices and then erased the actual drive, it succeeded. This is the first time I’ve had to reformat an SSD, and I didn’t know if reformatting would map out bad sectors as it does with hard disks, but it seemed worth a try.īut I started to get more worried when Disk Utility threw an error while trying to erase the boot volume (the iMac was running macOS 10.14 Mojave, so it didn’t have 10.15 Catalina’s bifurcated drive structure).
Plus, I could work on my 2012 13-inch MacBook Air during the lengthy restore process. I wasn’t terribly perturbed by all this, since I knew I had both a bootable duplicate from the night before and a Time Machine backup that had been working until I quit for the day, both on an external hard disk, not to mention Backblaze Internet backups. At some point in that process, I booted the iMac successfully again, just long enough for Watchman Monitoring to send an even more ominous warning. I could find no indication of what that error meant, but Apple’s support documentation was pretty clear about the next step being a reformat and restore. Another try (which took longer than it should have) failed with the same error.
The next morning, however, I checked the iMac and discovered that First Aid had failed with an error -69842. That was concerning, so I finished what I was doing, restarted in macOS Recovery by rebooting while holding down Command-R, launched Disk Utility, started First Aid, went to make dinner, and promptly forgot about it. Then I received an email from Watchman Monitoring, an essential tool used by sysadmins and consultants to keep track of Macs under their care, telling me about disk errors on my 2014 27-inch iMac’s SSD. There it was, Wednesday evening, and I was working hard to finish something for the day. Six Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac’s Dead SSD #1594: iOS 15.2.1, AirTag stalking, CES Tech Trends for 2022.#1595: Replacing the Time Capsule, AT&T and Verizon 5G coverage expands, is iOS 15's Focus overkill?.#1596: OS updates, Apple Q1 2022 outpaces supply constraints, Yahoo POP bug, Apple Personal Safety User Guide, Simply Piano.#1597: Apple Watch fitness tracking, cloud storage issues, Roku Express 4K+, watchOS 8.4.1.#1598: OS updates, Fantastical 3.6 self-scheduling, Mindfulness measures HRV, Monterey on too-old Macs, TidBITS list gremlins.