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Help! Mac Mini Fusion Drive won't start up and be repaired

I own a Late 2014 3.0GHz Mac Mini. I had to restart it because it started acting strangely while I was using it today. It shut off and wouldn't come back on after a few strange issues. I saw the Apple logo, the progress bar moved about 3/4 of the way, and then it turned off. I entered the Disk Utility after restarting in Recovery Mode. First Aid on Macintosh HD gave me errors stating that it could not be repaired. Should I get a new drive or is there anything I can do to fix it? I think Time Machine has backed up most of my stuff. What happens to the programs that I have installed if I restore from Time Machine? Thank you

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Amanda Wong

Amanda Wong

Answered on Tuesday, December 3, 2024

As you have already backed up your Mac with Time Machine, you can fix the Fusion Drive without losing data, or replace the Fusion Drive and then restore from the Time Machine backup drive.

When Fusion Drive Mac won't boot up, you can try to fix it in these ways:

  1. Boot into macOS recovery mode and run First Aid to repair it.
  2. Use Single User mode to run the FSCK command to repair the drive.
  3. Erase the Fusion Drive in macOS recovery mode.
  4. Fuse the Fusion drive from macOS Recovery mode > Terminal.

In case, all the methods above fail to fix the Fusion Drive on your Mac Mini, you may consider replacing the Fusion Drive, SSD is a good choice. You should ensure the new drive's capacity is larger than that of the Time Machine backup. 

If you receive the error "This disk does not have enough space to restore your system," the Time Machine drive may report a wrong disk space or the drive is corrupted, you can try to recover files from corrupted Time Machine drive, or run iBoysoft Data Recovery in macOS recovery mode to save files from the Fusion Drive before being overwritten.

 

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