Is this HDD from a 2013 iMAC completely dead?

Jagsalmararkzs wrote:

My old 2013 27” iMAC developed severe booting issues after an automatic download of a new OS a couple of years ago.

Is the HDD completely dead?

I am a complete novice when it comes to computers, and it was really pushing my envelope to take my old computer apart to retrieve the disk as it is!

Did your iMac use a Fusion Drive setup? If so, then we cannot tell what the condition of the drive may be without running DriveDx to check its health. Without the SSD portion of a Fusion Drive you may see that same information you have shown in the screenshot.

Is the HDD bad, most likely yes. How bad? Unknown without viewing the DriveDx health report.

FYI, when a Hard Drive is failing, then you usually only get one chance at recovering the data from it. The more you attempt to use or access a failing drive the more likely the failure will get worse to where even a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover anything. macOS & most consumer apps for data recovery cannot handle the I/O errors produced by a failing drive which quickly causes the failure to get worse.

Yup it's a goner, however to confirm please run DriveDX on it and if ANY errors appear that just confirms that it is dead.

You should get an external drive (SSD or HDD) that is 2-2 ½ times the size of your boot drive and enable Time Machine to backup your boot drive to the EHD. Time Machine comes with every Mac.

That way you will never lose critical files again. If you're serious about backups of your user data and want a quality EHD consider those from OWC (MacSales.com).

That’s what backups are for. Professional historians are very worried about how data will be preserved in this new century. We have thousand of copies of Civil War veteran’s letters home, even more from WWI and WWII. Now in the digital world all those emails and photos can be gone in an instant unless there are backup copies somewhere to access. My personal backup routine is every hour with Time Machine, once daily with SuperDuper, and once monthly stored off site in a relative’s home, some might use a bank Safety Deposit box.

That why wise users using Time Machine and create clones of their data on a daily basis!!! There is NO reason to not backup, all that is needed is an External Hard Disk (now easily less than $200 for HIGH QUALITY devices) and you are set. Time Machine has been pre-installed on every Mac for close to 20 years.

Simply click Back up your Mac with Time Machine to learn how simple it is. Many experienced users on these forums prefer the OWC Mercury Elite Pro External Hard Disk. A 2 or 4TB for most users is plenty of storage.

Jagsalmararkzs wrote:

If you must know I was shifting files from Photobucket to an external HDD when the internal HDD borked after trying to install an automatic update of the MacOS which it was no longer equipped to handle.

[Edited by Moderator]

Interesting because automatic updates don't even show for Macs that can’t run them. So it would be interesting to find out how you went about doing that and borked your iMac.