SOLVED logic board blues

[dennisfcampbell]

new logic board on late 2015 21.5 sierra imac.... was left unseialised and time machine was not recognized (not using Imac hd, all external drives ) got new Samsung T5 ssd to ccc the boot drive before erasing TM, after erasing and partitioning external TM backed up the boot drive then tried to upgrade to mohave from the app store... on completion found things not working, menu bar did not show any tools, no font sizing, tried dark mode, returning to light mode took several tries, also apps. mac and third party very slow to respond, some would not....tried to erase boot drive in utilities to start again...utilities would not allow and had changed the drive to APFS Media and now imac does not recognize, perhaps there was some damage in all this but i dont see how....figured since there is back up there was no problem however there was no recovery volume for the cloned drive..should I get another T5 >clone >create recovery volume or is there is another way to approach this ?????

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[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

Since your data is on external drives, I would completely erase the iMac and start over without any of the externals attached. You could then use Migration Assistant (instead of restoring from a clone) to sync your data back. You can then see if there are any issues when running from the internal drive and boosting from the externals.

Would that work?

C

 

[dennisfcampbell]

cory,
Discovered how to sync new logic board to mac address to access time machine, a little late but if there is anyone with problem this should help.......

10.5: Repair Time Machine after logic board changes - Mac OS X Hints

hints.macworld.com

Now the question is can this anomaly ( new logic board not serialized with computer ) cause problems with with upgrading to new osx...The imac is not used for anything except storage, the upgrades need to be on the externals, is understood that the imac would be a
"test run" however there is a possibility of losing a working osx ( sierra ) and not be able to return to full function .......Am going with your earlier advice to make sure that this issue is resolved completely before upgrading to Mojave, have lost one ssd and am skittish......
perhaps an app; disk warrior or terminal commands that can insure all is well for a smooth upgrade..can migration asst. detect problems ??

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hi,

The logic board not being serialized shouldn't cause any issues with upgrading macOS. Even though it is used just for storage, the external HDs still use the same iMac hardware information, since they are in effect the boot drive(s). That doesn't matter when starting up from internal/external drives.

If you are planning to install macOS on the internal, if it goes well, it should be all set. DiskWarrior and the like won't find issues on a cleanly erased and macOS installed drive. It checks the disk catalog/directory, which will be new and clean in that scenario. You could run a full surface scan of the drive with an application like Drive Genius or Tech Tool Pro to ensure the drive is good. Disk Utility doesn't perform a full check/surface scan of the drive - it checks the catalog/directory file like DiskWarrior., but doesn't have the same repair capability that DW does. DW is simply computer voodoo, and has saved so many people's data in the past for me, I cannot even tell you. It didn't repair a failing drive, but was able to mount them long enough to do a sudo ditto -P command in Terminal to copy data at the hardware level, which doesn't hang when it finds bad blocks like the Finder does.

Migration Assistant will only let you know there are issues by hanging/freezing during the migration, which will normally require a forced power off.

Hope that helps.

C

 

[dennisfcampbell]

thanks cory things are getting clearer one last ques. can onyx be used to clean up any unseen problems and make the transfer leaner ?

 

[Cory Cooper]

No worries.

OnyX can cleanup some things, but nothing really noticeable for a migration other than old log files and such.

C

 

[dennisfcampbell]

thanks