I am currently working on an iMac(iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017). The computer won't start up due to corruption in the storage confirmed by diagnostic testing. It will however boot into recovery and diagnostic mode. The customer wants me to try to pull any information I can from the hard drive to save their information so they may get a new computer and transfer the information to it. I have an 2 TB external drive, and they asking a pull of around 675GB of storage. After reformatting the HDD to APFS(which is what the customers format is), booting into recovery, and then using Disk Utility to try and clone the drive to the HDD via the restore process I get OSStatus error 49157 or OSStatus error 60. I have searched online and haven't really found a solution that doesn't require booting into the desktop of the computer. The prompt just says operation failed and will not clone the drive to the HDD. Is the customers internal drive for the computer to corrupt to pull the data from?(because it won't even make it passed the Apple Loading screen in start-up) or am I just doing something wrong or is there something I'm missing? I don't really know where to go from here besides tell the customer that the drive is to corrupt to be cloned. Again, I can't get into to the actual computer because the storage is corrupted somehow, the only screens I can get to are diagnostic and recovery mode.
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iMac Drive Clone issue.
- Thread starter dckuz
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What is the type of drive that is currently on the iMac? Such as an HDD, Fusion, or SSD? I think the base storage for that year is a 1TB Fusion Drive, but you could also get a SSD with that model, or the user could have split the Fusion Drive into a separate HDD and SSD.
If the user was using a Fusion Drive, and some part of it failed, I have used a SW called Diskdrill to recover files of a failed Fusion Drive from a friend's Mac and HDD from a family members Mac. It is free to try, and will show you if it finds files that can be recovered, but you have to pay to actually recover them. It can take a while too.
I personally find it easier to remove the drive prior to trying to get data from it, at least if the computer is not working and I can't boot from an external drive.
This makes troubleshooting much easier.
But since I have not used Disk Utility for copying files, I will let someone more knowledgable about it answer this for your.
If the user was using a Fusion Drive, and some part of it failed, I have used a SW called Diskdrill to recover files of a failed Fusion Drive from a friend's Mac and HDD from a family members Mac. It is free to try, and will show you if it finds files that can be recovered, but you have to pay to actually recover them. It can take a while too.
I personally find it easier to remove the drive prior to trying to get data from it, at least if the computer is not working and I can't boot from an external drive.
Have you tried to boot externally? If you do not have an external boot drive, just make one, install a fresh OS on the Mac using the recovery SW. An SSD would be best, but really any drive would work on Intel Macs, HDD, SD card, thumb drive, etc.
This makes troubleshooting much easier.
I haven't used Disk Utility to copy files in a long, long time, maybe back when it was called Disk Firstaid. Unless something has changed it isn't a true "clone", as I am pretty sure it won't boot.
But since I have not used Disk Utility for copying files, I will let someone more knowledgable about it answer this for your.
What I would try:
Boot the iMac from an EXTERNAL USB3 drive.
Since your diagnostic testing indicates "corruption in the storage", when you boot from an external drive you will bypass that problem and the computer should boot.
Don't have an external boot drive?
It might be possible to create one by:
a. booting to INTERNET recovery (Command-OPTION-R)
b. installing a copy of the OS onto an external drive
c. booting from that external drive
You could use either the customer-provided drive or one of your own.
IF you can get the iMac booted and running that way, and IF the internal drive then can be mounted on the desktop, THEN you could try either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to clone the contents of the internal drive to an external "target" drive.
BE AWARE that CarbonCopyCloner can "work around" disk and file corruption during the cloning process (whereas the finder cannot).
If CCC encounters one or more "bad files", it will skip trying to copy them, and move on to the next file that is "copy-able", etc.
At the end of the process, CCC will present you with a log that shows what was skipped over.
In contrast, the finder CANNOT do this.
If the finder encounters a bad file, it aborts the ENTIRE copying process.
Thus, CCC can produce a clone of "all that is good", whereas the finder would fail.
Boot the iMac from an EXTERNAL USB3 drive.
Since your diagnostic testing indicates "corruption in the storage", when you boot from an external drive you will bypass that problem and the computer should boot.
Don't have an external boot drive?
It might be possible to create one by:
a. booting to INTERNET recovery (Command-OPTION-R)
b. installing a copy of the OS onto an external drive
c. booting from that external drive
You could use either the customer-provided drive or one of your own.
IF you can get the iMac booted and running that way, and IF the internal drive then can be mounted on the desktop, THEN you could try either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to clone the contents of the internal drive to an external "target" drive.
BE AWARE that CarbonCopyCloner can "work around" disk and file corruption during the cloning process (whereas the finder cannot).
If CCC encounters one or more "bad files", it will skip trying to copy them, and move on to the next file that is "copy-able", etc.
At the end of the process, CCC will present you with a log that shows what was skipped over.
In contrast, the finder CANNOT do this.
If the finder encounters a bad file, it aborts the ENTIRE copying process.
Thus, CCC can produce a clone of "all that is good", whereas the finder would fail.
So I can get the Mac to boot from an external drive, I have just never heard of mounting the internal drive to the external one, I will surely give this a try and see how it goes. I hope there's some article or something on how to do that, because I have no idea. I also have never worked with CarbonCopyCloner so I will try this method sometime today or tomorrow and get back to you and let you know how it goes! Thanks.
It looks like this is working 526GB cloned out of 574GB. I'm going to call this fixed and done. Thank you for your help FishRRMan