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LETTER OF THE MONTH
Re: “Missing hardware diagnostics” query in Mac|Life’s “Ask” Q&A section, (April 2021, p73):
“My iMac can’t enter hardware Diagnostics. When I hold down the D key during startup, it complains that it can’t load EFI/Driver/ TestSupport.efi and I have to restart. How can I check its hardware?”
Though the answer to this question was quite good, my first go-to question whenever someone says they can’t access a startup function is: “What kind of keyboard are you using?” Every time (in my experience) it turns out they’re using an aftermarket board. I first encountered this with my wife’s iMac years ago; I had gotten her a Matias board which was at–a– glance nearly identical to the stock iMac board. But Recovery, Internet Recovery, Diagnostics, option to select a different startup disk — nothing worked. Jumping ahead in the story, as soon as I swapped out that board for an actual Apple keyboard, it worked fine. This isn’t universal; my Kinesis Freestyle ergo board does the boot select stuff just fine. Thanks again for the great “Ask” section; though I eventually read the whole publication, “Ask” is the first point I usually stop and read start to finish.