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My 2013 Mac Mini with 1 TB Fusion drive was starting to run really slowly. I got a brand new 1 TB SSD fitted and am trying to restore from Time Machine, now. The restore can see the Time Machine drive no problem, but when it goes forward to choose a destination disk, there is no disk indicated.

So I restart the restore process, and this time go into disk utility. What's strange is that I can see the Samsung SSD, but also the original Macintosh HD. I know that it's not there, as I have it sitting next to me (and besides.. can Minis have more than one internal drive?).

So I guess what I need to do is to remove the "ghost" disk from Disk Utility and then prepare the SSD as "Macintosh HD" to accept my restore.

Can someone tell me how I do this?

Allan
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Darren Matheson
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1 Answers1

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The problem you are experiencing is because you only replaced the 1TB spinning portion of the Fusion drive; the 128GB SSD is still there with the boot partition on it.

You've confirmed this when you said that you can see both the Samsung SSD and the original HD. What you need to do now is wipe both and create a new Fusion drive to combine the 128GB SSD and the 1TB SSD into one CoreStorage volume.

I've detailed these steps in this post on how to do this. Since you've got everything backed up with Time Machine and are using it for recovery, you should have no problems migrating your data over.

Allan
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  • Thanks, Allan. How do I create the bootable disk mentioned in your link? Or is that the Time Machine drive? – Darren Matheson Apr 12 '19 at 13:54
  • That’s the bootable USB installer. Unfortunately, you’re past that point unless you have another Mac. For now, just use Internet recovery as you’ve been doing – Allan Apr 12 '19 at 14:25
  • I have another Mac, and have just created the installer. I'll now go and use your method, thanks. :-) – Darren Matheson Apr 12 '19 at 14:36
  • OK so I have got as far as diskutil coreStorage createVolume XXXXetc. HFS+ "iMac HD" 100%

    The output is 'the given file system is not supported on Core Storage (-69756)'

     – Darren Matheson Apr 12 '19 at 15:18
  • Try it with just HFS instead. You can wipe it later. – Allan Apr 12 '19 at 15:50
  • So another issue. I installed MacOS, and then I ran 'Restore from a Time Machine backup', and that seemed to work. But even when I remove the Time Machine volume from the Mac and restart, it still comes up on 'OSX Utilities'. – Darren Matheson Apr 12 '19 at 21:45
  • You should have used a Migration assistant. Restoring like that overwrites everything you just did – Allan Apr 12 '19 at 22:36
  • But I want to restore the Mac to the position it was in just before I unplugged it to have the disk fitted. – Darren Matheson Apr 13 '19 at 08:23