Murphy’s Law dictates that if we’re going to have problems with one SSD, it’ll be the one tucked away under the glass front of the iMac. It’s a lot easier to troubleshoot and a lot easier to repair. I put the same SSD model in my own computer, a Mac Pro tower with easily accessible drive bays and an old-school wired keyboard. Each of these requires holding a certain key down while the computer is booting. ↩īooting from CD to upgrade firmware, or booting from the recovery partition to attempt disk repair. You can probably guess that I’m not quite as happy with these as I wanted to be. You’d think Apple’s help docs could mention this, since they’ve been shipping Bluetooth keyboards by default with all their desktop machines for years now.īoth of these occasions involved disk failures in the Crucial M4 SSD I installed a year ago. Any earlier than that, and you’ll be ignored. It turns out the magic answer is to reboot the computer, wait for the LED on the keyboard to flash (which is after the computer starts booting and chimes and does a self-test which on this iMac with 12GB of memory all takes about 20 seconds), and then immediately press and hold Command-R. Do I need to go find a USB keyboard to plug in? Not quite.

Does that cause complications, like, the computer and keyboard aren’t able to communicate right at the beginning of the boot process? Yes 4. Wait a minute, I’m using a Bluetooth keyboard. Restart and try again.Īfter reading and rereading that, I try a few more times, holding Command-R earlier and earlier as Apple recommends, and, no luck. Note: If you see a login window or your own desktop and icons, it is possible that you didn’t hold Command-R early enough. After the Recovery System is finished starting up, you should see a desktop with a OS X menu bar and a “Mac OS X Utilities” application window. Restart your Mac and hold down the Command key and the R key (Command-R), and keep holding them until the Apple icon appears, indicating that your Mac is starting up. I’ve just wasted a minute and I’m back where I started.Īpple’s support document on recovery mode makes it sound so easy: This is normally easy on a Mac, but not quite so easy on a Mac with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard 3.īoth times, it was an exercise in frustration, as I give the reboot command and wait about 10 seconds for the reboot to actually happen then I hold Command-R, watch the screen blink black, wait, watch it blink white, wait, chime, wait, Apple logo, wait, and… oh hello, login screen! That’s not right. Twice in the last few months 1 I’ve had to do troubleshooting steps on Vanessa’s iMac that involved booting from alternate volumes 2.

Reboot imac with keyboard