I'm trying to reformat a Mac that was handed to me by an employee after being wiped, and I'm starting to think they did too good a job.
At boot, you see the blinking folder + ? icon, indicating no bootable partition found:
Loading the recovery partition (after resetting NVRAM), I tried all this on both the Internet Recovery partition which was Snow Leopard and a macOS Sierra media installer via USB.
First, Disk Utility didn't show the drive:
From there, I tried diskutil list
Which didn't see the drive. Then I tried df -h
Failing anything else, I restarted and held 'd' to get into Apple Hardware Test:
Running the test reported "no problems found". The Hardware Profile tab did not report a hard disk, but I'm not sure it ever does (I don't have any other pre-2013 Macs to test on).
So, I'm left without many options. I can't boot into single user mode, because there's not an install into which I can boot. I don't know how to reformat/repartition a physical drive that's not reported by diskutil or df. And it's clearly not something I can fix with setting up a logical volume in CoreStorage (on the Sierra recovery image, that is) if the underlying physical disks are absent.
Can anything else be done, or is this all pointing to the SSD being dead?
Best Answer
The answer was that the SSD died. Replacing the SSD fixed it.