Factory Reset

Hello!
my mac Apple iMac ME086LL/A 21.5-Inch Desktop is getting very slow and I have decided to factory reset it. I'd be grateful if you could help me with some suggestions:
1. do I need to deauthorize and log out of accounts if I intend to keep my mac?

2. could you look at the print screen and suggest which disk I should erase? It is a bit confusing.

3. Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Gury

his there,


there is no need to sign out of the accounts if you are continuing to use the same iMac as it will log in ask you to verify its you and still be the only machine in iCloud.


as for formatting the disk and starting over the 1TB is the one you want to format don't forget to give the HDD a name in the format section so it don't say untitled (not necessary)

Make a good backup before you do anything. And you may want to make a bootable USB Thumb drive so that you can boot from that and from there do the formatting of the internal drive. You cannot be booted from the drive and erase it. The system will not permit that.

The reason for slowness is that poor old platter hard drive and if this is a recent model, you can connect a super fast SSD externally via USB3 or Thunderbolt for greatly improved performance.

Your iMac is probably a late 2013 model and both the above options are available.

Harry make some good valid points, but I would suggest your idea of doing a Factory Reset due to some slowness is complete overkill!!

You don't mention having done ANY sort of maintenance or anything, nor any mention of what is actually slow.

You could probably speed things up drastically just by doing a clone backup, erase and Zero out your existing HDD, then clone the backup back to your internal boot drive.
My recommendation would be to use Carbon Copy Cloner.app for the backup.

PS: My original 2011 iMac 1 TB HDD spinner is still more than plenty fast for all my needs, and yes, I have performed the operation I describe above on it, maybe at least twice over the years.

Why create all that extra work to do a Factory Reset, just because of some current slowness??? Not for me thanks.






- Patrick
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I too would suggest doing a factory reset is both complex and unnecessary. As Patrick has said you do not mention having tried any other solutions and a factory reset would be my last option.
For example how much storage do you have free on your HD? Are you aware that less than 20% free storage can cause spinning beach balls and general slowness overall.?Have you tried running First Aid from the native Disk Utility app? Have you tried running the free Maintainence app OnyX which can empty system caches and clear out a lot of unnecessary clutter? I would certainly check all those boxes first.
Also how many background applications are running? Check your list of Startup Items in System Preferences > Users and Accounts > Login items.



Sent from my ageing iPad Mini iOS 9.3.5 Mac-Forums

Thank you all so much for your helpful suggestions! Indeed I did not try all the other options. I will give it a try before I do a factory reset.
Gury

gury said:

Thank you all so much for your helpful suggestions! Indeed I did not try all the other options. I will give it a try before I do a factory reset.
Gury

Click to expand...

In case you missed it, Member Randy B. Singer has some good Mac maintenance pages and suggestions that you should find helpful at:
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html





- Patrick
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That's where they are, yes great reference from Randy. Try them first for sure.