Tweet
It's been a long while since I last contributed to this forum. My 2020 iMac has had these nagging system stability issues for quite some years that I just dealt with. After a 3-month chaos with OWC ram at purchase, I switched to Crucial RAM (128GB) which has worked flawlessly up until macOS Monterey. Ever since MacOS Ventura, I was unable to do any MacOS upgrades/patches unless I remove all Crucial RAM and re-install the OEM Mac RAM (2x4GB). It has gotten progressively worse with macOS Sonoma. I still have to remove the Crucial RAM in order to do MacOS updates, but now randomly my machine will crash/shutdown behaving the exact same way (freeze, Fans full speed for 1 second, then shutdown) as when I was using the OWC RAM modules.
My iMac will run perfectly with OEM RAM. I know something changed with Apple's firmware. I tried doing a macOS Monterey reinstall, and then a prompt came up that Apple needed to apply some firmware updates, and after it completed, I was unable to boot from my MacOS USB stick unless I re-installed my OEM RAM. So something changed.
I'd like to run MEMTEST just to see what it comes up with. I have never ran it when I used Crucial RAM. With the same behaviors now, I'd like to see what's going on.
So that's my history. Now... I have a bootable USB stick as per the installation instructions. I'm all good there.
When I attempt to boot off the USB stick, two issues arise:
1 - I get two instances of "NO NAME" USB boot drives when I attempt to boot (option key) at iMac restart. Both instances produce the next error.
2 - It attempts to load. About halfway into the boot, I get the message "This version of MacOS on the selected disk needs to be re-installed".
Has anyone had this issue, and if so how did you resolve it? I just reinstalled macOS Sonoma earlier today before trying Memtest. So I find it odd to get this error when I'm trying to run MEMTEST outside of booting MacOS.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
2020 iMac - 10-core i9 - 128GB RAM (Crucial) - 8TB SSD - MacOS Sonoma
My iMac will run perfectly with OEM RAM. I know something changed with Apple's firmware. I tried doing a macOS Monterey reinstall, and then a prompt came up that Apple needed to apply some firmware updates, and after it completed, I was unable to boot from my MacOS USB stick unless I re-installed my OEM RAM. So something changed.
I'd like to run MEMTEST just to see what it comes up with. I have never ran it when I used Crucial RAM. With the same behaviors now, I'd like to see what's going on.
So that's my history. Now... I have a bootable USB stick as per the installation instructions. I'm all good there.
When I attempt to boot off the USB stick, two issues arise:
1 - I get two instances of "NO NAME" USB boot drives when I attempt to boot (option key) at iMac restart. Both instances produce the next error.
2 - It attempts to load. About halfway into the boot, I get the message "This version of MacOS on the selected disk needs to be re-installed".
Has anyone had this issue, and if so how did you resolve it? I just reinstalled macOS Sonoma earlier today before trying Memtest. So I find it odd to get this error when I'm trying to run MEMTEST outside of booting MacOS.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
2020 iMac - 10-core i9 - 128GB RAM (Crucial) - 8TB SSD - MacOS Sonoma
Comment