Chosen Solution
I have an iMac with a hard drive that (partially) failed. It was loaded with the iMac OS (which I didn’t use) and bootcamp. I was able to remove it from the iMac, hook it up to a PC and get all the data off of it that I needed. It seems to be pretty unreliable, and will not boot. I purchased an SSD and would like to to install it in the iMac, running windows. I tried cloning the Bootcamp partition (EaseUS Todo Free), but installed in the iMac it just game me a folder icon with a question mark, would not even boot to a drive selector screen. I’d prefer not to repurchase windows or Mac OS, although it looks like I could get Mac OS pretty cheap. The SSD is the same size as the old HDD. I’ve tried loading the old drive as a USB (USB-SATA cable) but the iMac didn’t recognize it. I’m thinking my next steps would be to try a mac bootable USB flash drive (of course I can’t find one at the moment), take both drives to Simply Mac and tell them to make it go, or. . . Suggestions? Thanks, Dano
Firstly, make sure you have the inline digital thermal sensor installed in the iMac like the one listed here (https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIDI…) This will prevent your Mac fans running at full speed. furthermore if you’d like to clone the bootcamp installation from your old drive I would recommend downloading a trial copy of windows to a usb and installing it on the iMac, then clone the old drive to that partition. (if you clone without first installing a copy first the boot order will be wrong and the Mac will fail to boot) I use paragon disk utility for cloning but I don’t see why ease us wouldn’t work. Mac OS is free you can use network recovery on most modern Macs to reinstall os. as the iMac is switching on hold these keys down until you see the globe. Command (⌘) – Option (⌥) – R
