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Main SSD not booting, HDD clone OK - options needed

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Jul 12, 2016
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Motherboard
Gigabyte H170N-WIFI
CPU
Intel Core i3 6100 Skylake Dual-Core 3.7 GHz Processor
Graphics
On board Intel
Mac
  1. iMac
Classic Mac
  1. PowerBook
My main SSD is not booting, it hangs on the Apple logo, using the Clover menu at boot selecting the HDD Clone and it boots OK, what's the best way to diagnose the issue and recover the system back to the SSD or possibly a new SSD if required please?

I have Carbon Copy Cloner and was thinking to use Disk Utility on the SSD, erase the Sierra partition and then copy from the Clone HDD over to my SSD using CCC and see it it boots? I don't want to mess up my EFI though as machine still in use. I've also mounted the EFI off of the main SSD and taken a copy of it. The EFI mount from the clone HDD looks pretty empty.

I've also got Time Machine running.

This is a system I've been running OK for a good few years from the SSD. Think I'm in a position to save the system but I don't want to mess it up at the first step. Thanks
 
My main SSD is not booting, it hangs on the Apple logo, using the Clover menu at boot selecting the HDD Clone and it boots OK, what's the best way to diagnose the issue and recover the system back to the SSD or possibly a new SSD if required please?

I have Carbon Copy Cloner and was thinking to use Disk Utility on the SSD, erase the Sierra partition and then copy from the Clone HDD over to my SSD using CCC and see it it boots? I don't want to mess up my EFI though as machine still in use. I've also mounted the EFI off of the main SSD and taken a copy of it. The EFI mount from the clone HDD looks pretty empty.

I've also got Time Machine running.

This is a system I've been running OK for a good few years from the SSD. Think I'm in a position to save the system but I don't want to mess it up at the first step. Thanks

If your HDD clone was a clone of the system on the SSD before the SSD started failing, then booting into the clone and using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone the system on the HDD back to SSD should be enough to get it working again (both programs should offer to erase the target partition so there is no need to erase it beforehand), unless of course there is something actually wrong with the SSD.

But before you do that I would recommend you to first make a bootable USB stick and verify that it can boot your HDD clone successfully before proceeding (e.g. by using the backup EFI from the SSD), if you do not already have such a stick. If you have to replace your SSD you will temporarily lose the capability to boot from the HDD/SSD and you need to boot into MacOS somehow to clone the HDD back to the SSD, and that is where the bootable USB stick comes in.
 
Thanks Mr Bond. That worked very well for me. Proved the USB first as you recommended and then I booted from the HDD backup clone and once at the desktop using Carbon Copy Cloner made a full transfer of all files over to the SSD. Restarted and booted ok from the SSD. The backup clone really was a life saver, pleased I did this when building the machine.
 
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