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iMac booting to external drive

I've been asked to take a look at an issue for a friend and I don't think I'm getting the whole story but here we go...

It's not booting to the internal drive it's booting to a connected external drive. It looks like they setup a daily backup via Carbon Copy Cloner to this external drive from the Macintosh HD. The Macintosh HD is no longer there. I can't see it in the disk utility or in the recovery utility. The only thing available in the recovery utility is the external HD and Disk0 with OS X Base System under it. It seems that the Macintosh HD is gone. I have tried many different tasks to "see" the Macintosh HD and still no joy. Is there any way to identify the internal HD and perform a recovery from the CCC to the HD to get this Mac booting back up to the internal drive and not the external one?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Dec 28, 2020 2:39 PM

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Posted on Dec 28, 2020 3:59 PM

All signs the internal drive has died, lucky they have the CCC clone! :)

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iMac booting to external drive

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