The real struggle is restoring a Mac from scratch after a few years

I have two old Macs — a late 2011 Mac Mini and late 2015 iMac. This journey started when I finally ran out of space on my iMac’s 256gb SSD.

On hindsight, I should have just got an external thunderbolt 2 or USB 3 SSD. That is faster than connecting an SSD to the internal SATA port. And I did not know that the original SSD in the iMac is an NVMe like proprietary Apple SSD which you can’t replace unless you get one used.

Anyway, I did not have the time to open up the iMac as I figured out originally. So, I got someone else to put in a 2 TB Samsung SATA SSD and setup a Fusion Drive. On hindsight, maybe RAID 0 would have been a better choice (but not absolutely sure about that yet — as I am still testing the stability).

El Capitan did work fine. I just could not get it to upgrade to Monterey — either from the backup — which fails to restore as the backup is not compatible with older OS’s or even from within the OS using the upgrade image (which is not easy to download from El Capitan’s broken Safari).

The problem is the fusion drive. After using ChatGPT extensively, I figured that you have to use the reset command to get it to a state where Monterey will install on it — and you restore from backup after the manual install. The only way to get it to install…