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User profile for user: jjbonbon
jjbonbon Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

First aid can’t fix disk

hi there, just looking for some help. recently my iMac was playing up, crashing very easily, (I haven’t updated the OS in ages) I did a full back up with Time Machine on a free hard drive and restarted my Mac and hit command R on the boot up. When trying to run first aid on my hard drive it said ‘first aid process has failed. If possible back up data, click done to continue’ so I clicked done and nothing happened. At the same time I noticed the disk has been unmounted, when I click on ‘mount’ nothing happens. This has never happened before. I tried exiting the recovery mode and when the Mac restarted it didn’t load up and turned off. I have never had this happen on my Mac ever and really worried, just glad I did a full recent back up. My question is that going back into recovery with command R, should I just select ‘restore’ from my external HD? Will that mount the disk again and basically take me back to where I was and would I have to run recovery again after resorting the Mac from the HD? Or will it fix the issue along the way? Pretty sure this has been asked before but just wanted to post my experience step by step to get some help and advice with it. I’ve never had a problem like this on my Mac ever and recently I’ve worried that I might have damaged the hard drive as i moved my Mac in front of a window in a cold room and I realised in recent times it’s probably dropped to 10 degrees Celsius or lower with it right beside the widow, do you think this may be a part of the problem and I might need to buy a new internal HD? Prior to the crashing etc it was still working fine despite a lot of the software being out of date. Many thanks

iMac (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Jan 12, 2025 4:01 PM

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9 replies
User profile for user: D.I. Johnson
D.I. Johnson
User level: Level 7
25,535 points

Jan 12, 2025 4:42 PM in response to jjbonbon

I agree with @KiltedTim and think this is likely a failure of the hdd.


But before you think about replacing the internal drive of that iMac, you should seriously consider just using an external drive as the startup disk. It's relatively inexpensive, easy to setup, and would likely perform as well as the internal drive.


You didn't tell us the model or year of your iMac, but your signature line says 2017-2020. If the machine is a 2017, then it's a vintage Mac and will fall into obsolete class very soon. This will make spending the money to replace the internal drive less attractive.


Please take a look at this great user tip by user @Jack-19 on the subject of external startup drives. I think this would be a great way for you to move forward.

Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community


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User profile for user: jjbonbon
jjbonbon Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Jan 13, 2025 5:23 AM in response to D.I. Johnson

Thank you for your response. It was bought in 2017 so might even be a 2016 model, im not 100% sure. Whenever I’ve had problems before I’ve just gone to first aid in recovery and it’s sorted it out. But with recent crashes experiencing the never ending spinning wheel, I have had to hard reset with the button at the back on several occasions. When you say failure of the HDD do you mean it’s totally broken? If I try restoring my backup onto the same drive do you think it will work or not? Prior to this I freed up about 100gb of space on the Mac and it was running better but I didn’t test it with apps like light room that I use a lot.


I will look into running the machine from an external drive, this is helpful. Wondering if I can run it from the back up drive I made just before this actually.

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User profile for user: D.I. Johnson
D.I. Johnson
User level: Level 7
25,535 points

Jan 13, 2025 9:18 AM in response to jjbonbon

You're welcome.


The spinning wheel (beach-balling) is an indication that the drive may be having trouble reading stored data, so it keeps retrying and thus the processing is slowed. When I say "failure of the HDD" I don't necessarily mean "totally broken", just broken enough; moving toward eventual full failure.


All drives will fail. A 2016/2017 drive is now eight or nine (!) years old. That's in the sweet spot of hdd failure due to age. That drive's best years are behind it.


If this is a hardware problem - likely - then restoring a backup to the same drive won't fix it.

First Aid routines can only do so much and only for so long before the fixes no longer work.



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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
62,156 points

Jan 17, 2025 9:02 PM in response to jjbonbon

jjbonbon wrote:

Ok thanks for letting know. Do you think there’s any chance I can restore the data onto the original HDD in the machine using the restore option in recovery?

No, you do not use the Disk Utility Restore function for restoring the system or the data.


The Disk Utility "Restore" function barely works for small drives and is certainly not a good option for cloning a boot drive. Don't even consider using it since it rarely works.


As @dialabrain mentions, you would need to perform a clean install of macOS by first erasing the drive followed by installing macOS. If you are using Time Machine for your backups, then you would need to go through Setup Assistant when first booting the new OS and at some point Setup Assistant will ask if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup. If you used some other backup method, then you will need to figure out how to restore those items.


I agree with the others that your hard drive has most likely failed so installing macOS to an external USB3 SSD is your best option if you want to continue using this iMac (easiest & least expensive option).

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First aid can’t fix disk

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