So last week the hard drive on my iMac stopped working. I had tried to repair the drive and reinstall Mac OS X. In the end I bought a new external hard drive and decided a new approach and in my last blog post I discussed how I was using the migration assistant to copy files and settings from the defunct drive to the new external drive, and how I had to wait….
Having left my iMac overnight I came down the following morning, slightly apprehensive I looked in on the iMac, pressed the space bar, and I was rather downhearted to see the prohibitory symbol.
Oh no, this reminded me of 2017 when the fusion drive had failed.
It looked like the whole process hadn’t worked.
So I went to make coffee, but when I came back it had gone and I saw the Migration Assistant back in full flow finalising the migration. Maybe it had worked.
Once the migration process had finished I rebooted the iMac using the external drive and everything was working now.
Well not quite, though all my data was on the external hard drive, the settings needed to be updated and various applications needed passwords and all manner of things.
So my plan for the day was to work from the external hard drive and then later reformat the iMac hard drive and migrate the data back.
To be honest I got so fed up with the spinning beachball that I started the Migration Assistant just before lunch. I took the decision not to migrate some of the user accounts, as yes I wanted to retain the data, but didn’t need it on the main machine.
So I formatted the internal iMac fusion drive, checked the health of the drive and installed a fresh copy of OS X on there. I then started the Migration Assistant, taking the data and settings from the external drive and putting it back on the internal drive.
What was interesting was how much faster this process was from external hard drive to the internal drive compared to the other way round.
It was also interesting to note that once I had completed the migration, that unlike working from the external drive, as well as no spinning beachballs, most things were working just as they were before the crash.
So, so far, all seems to be working fine.