It never rains…

First, the good news. I'm home. With my vision more than good enough to drive, despite the fact I have some healing left to do, I was able to make my way slowly back to Sussex with the car. I took my time, largely sticking to A and B roads, over the weekend, and it was a lovely drive, once I relaxed into it.

And, as an extra special treat, I got to spend the night in a Travelodge on the way, too…

I was welcomed home with a dairy-free coffee cake, which was lovely and touching. And it was nice to sink back into the routine of family life, as far as I can in my somewhat damaged state.

Well, it was until my wife lobbed a casual problem my way.

“Oh, the iMac upstairs is playing up,” she said. “It's shut down unexpectedly once or twice.”

Uh-oh.

So, on Sunday evening, I ran Disk Utility across it, and found a whole bunch of unfixable errors. Time to make sure my Time Machine backup was up-to-date, and do a wipe and reinstall. So, I set the backup going, and went to bed.

Farewell, old SSD

Two things happened overnight:

1. The backup finished.
2. The internal SSD gave up the ghost.

And so my first day back “working” was largely consumed by finding a fast external SSD I had, clearing it down, and using Internet Restore to install a new version of MacOS on it.

What I'd forgotten is that an internet restore puts back the original OS that the computer originally came with. In this case, as it was an early 2020 purchase (to support a rapid shift to online training), it was 2019's Catalina:

I'd also completely forgotten quite how much the visual style of macOS has changed over six years:

So, next step was to get it updated to the newest version it can run, which is macOS Sequoia. Again, a fairly painless process.

And then, I was able to restore it from a Time Machine backup. As of now, it's all working.

My Mac future

Why am I going to so much effort to resurrect a 2020, pre-Apple Silicon computer rather than just buying a new one? Well, I had already planned to replace this iMac with a Mac Mini and a new screen sometime this year. The problem is that you can't get hold of a Mac Mini for a couple of months, due to what is probably a combination of demand from AI folks, and a production rundown before the launch of the M5 version.

So, if I can keep this machine working for a few months, I will. My back-up plan is to just get the new screen now, and use my MacBook Pro with it. And it might yet come to that. Fingers crossed…

Recovery check-in

For the interested, this is how I'm looking now, a week after the accident: