THIS WILL BE THE MOST IMPORTANT MONEY YOU CAN SPEND ON A NEW iMAC. an Apple-refurbished 2015 iMac.ĭO NOT buy ANY new Mac (any kind of Mac) UNLESS it has an SSD inside it.įor a new iMac, it will cost $100 more (256gb SSD) or $300 more (512gb SSD). It -IS- time to 'think about replacing it with something else'. Newer versions of the OS run like molasses on older Macs with platter-based hard drives. If it's any version of the OS from Mavericks or later, the reason that it's running slow is simple - it has a platter-based hard drive inside. The drive is showing no errors.You didn't tell us which OS is on your wife's iMac, and that's the most important thing of all. Same thing happened towards the end of the install. So I reboot my computer back but this time i try Internet Recovery Mode (CMD+OPT+R), reran disk utility and it gave me no errors, so I tried to erase/format the drive and then attempted to reinstall MacOS High Sierra. So I exit out of the installer and open up disk utility again and did a verify/repair, everything showed up okay but when I attempted to erase/format the drive it gave me an error that it couldn't unmount. I then proceed to reinstall Mac OS X Mountain Lion, and at the end where it says 0% I get the same error saying: An error occurred while preparing the installation. My drive is in HFS Journaled btw, not sure if that makes a difference or I should format it to AFPS.

I boot my iMac back into recovery mode (CMD+R) and performed a verify/repair on my drive and everything seems okay, no problems. Okay I was able to un-couple my Fusion drive and then re-fuse it back together. I'd just put together a good USB3 external drive (either HDD or SSD) and use that for additional storage instead. It's not worth the trouble of 'extracting' or replacing it. IF the HDD will not pass the 'repair disk' tests, I'd just leave it 'unused in place'.

If it checks out ok, I'd use it as a 'standalone drive' for storage and keep it backed up. If the results are good, I'd run 'repair disk' on it 10 times in succession, looking for a good report each and every time.ġ0. If so, install a copy of the OS onto it, get an account set upħ. DE-FUSE the internal fusion drive using TerminalĤ. BACK UP whatever you wish to save on the internal fusion drive if you can (it -might- be 'mountable' IF you boot from an external drive)ģ. (if you don't have an external drive that is bootable, you'll need to create one)Ģ.

Imac 2009 hard drive replacement