El Capitan reinstall not possible

[roommillenia]

Would somebody please help?: My iMac mid 2010, running OS 10.11.3 recently became very slow and erratic. Onyx tells me S.M.A.R.T failed, sometimes it appears ok. l made a thumb flash with the installer and tried to reinstall, but after restart and holding the option-key, the machine shuts down after a couple of seconds. Same for hardware test so had to recover from Time-machine.
Thanks for advice!
Richard

 

[chscag]

Sounds like it's time to change out your hard drive. It shows all the symptoms of a failing drive. Make sure you understand that you need to install a hard drive that is compatible with your 2010 iMac or the fans in your machine will take off like a 747. Do some googling on the subject. And make sure you have good backups.

 

[harryb2448]

SMART never lies. The hard drive is about to or has failed. Backup using a clone which will be bootable and suggest because of Apple'sproprietory heat sensors taking to an Apple or Reseller Store.

 

[Rod]

Harryb2448's suggestion is a good one. Unfortunatly this does mean the purchase of a USB external HD preferably with more storage than your Macintosh HD. Say you have a 128Gb Macintosh HD then a USB external HD of 250Gb would be ideal. It should be a dedicated HD so that incremental backups can be made. Once you are satisfied it is complete and bootable you could even erase your old Time Machine HD although I like to have both.
The huge advantage of a bootable clone is that should you lose or damage your computer you can boot another Mac laptop with your clone and it will be just the same as your computer. All your files, your Operating System, settings, preferences and applications will be identical to your computer at last backup. Apart from this obvious advantage you can also use the clone to restore all of the previously mentioned data to a new HD or new computer eliminating the need for Migration Assistant. No setting up iCloud, email, browser sites, application settings, passwords etc,etc.
I personally chose Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software available here https://bombich.com
Super Duper is also good. They are both about the same price and both offer 30 day free trials which means for your purposes it will make a free copy and if you like it you can buy it later.
My wife's Macintosh HD died a couple of months ago so she ran her MBP off her Carbon Copy Cloner backup for two weeks while we awaited the arrival of a new drive. Once the new drive was installed she simply restored her data from the clone onto the new drive and was back up and running in a hour. It really can't get any easier than that.

 

[roommillenia]

Reinstall ElCapitan not possible

Sounds like it's time to change out your hard drive. It shows all the symptoms of a failing drive. Make sure you understand that you need to install a hard drive that is compatible with your 2010 iMac or the fans in your machine will take off like a 747. Do some googling on the subject. And make sure you have good backups.

Thanks for the fast reply. Well, as you mentioned, the hard drive can fail any moment. Besides TimeMachine l have an ext. bootable hard disk but since it's a clone, it seems there are some corrupted files, therefore the question for the reinstall and the option-key for getting the disk in utilities.

 

[roommillenia]

Harryb2448's suggestion is a good one. Unfortunatly this does mean the purchase of a USB external HD preferably with more storage than your Macintosh HD. Say you have a 128Gb Macintosh HD then a USB external HD of 250Gb would be ideal. It should be a dedicated HD so that incremental backups can be made. Once you are satisfied it is complete and bootable you could even erase your old Time Machine HD although I like to have both.
The huge advantage of a bootable clone is that should you lose or damage your computer you can boot another Mac laptop with your clone and it will be just the same as your computer. All your files, your Operating System, settings, preferences and applications will be identical to your computer at last backup. Apart from this obvious advantage you can also use the clone to restore all of the previously mentioned data to a new HD or new computer eliminating the need for Migration Assistant. No setting up iCloud, email, browser sites, application settings, passwords etc,etc.
I personally chose Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software available here https://bombich.com
Super Duper is also good. They are both about the same price and both offer 30 day free trials which means for your purposes it will make a free copy and if you like it you can buy it later.
My wife's Macintosh HD died a couple of months ago so she ran her MBP off her Carbon Copy Cloner backup for two weeks while we awaited the arrival of a new drive. Once the new drive was installed she simply restored her data from the clone onto the new drive and was back up and running in a hour. It really can't get any easier than that.

Thanks, sorry didn't mentioned it. have already done as you suggested. The problem is that there are some corrupted files on the cloned ext. hard drive on which like to do an reinstall. My question was: why can't restart with option down?