MacBook – Stuck during High Sierra installation and now no startup disk found

disk-utilityhigh sierramacbook prostartup

I was upgrading my MacBook Air from Sierra to High Sierra, but the installation failed and the last line of log window was an error about directoryd.

I restarted and then came across the blinking folder with question mark. So I tried recovery mode (Command + R). Disk Utility shows my Macintosh disk properly and there is no problem with it (I checked it with First Aid), but I cannot see any disks on Startup Disk window. what can I do to bring it there?

I have "Install High Sierra.app" on my external drive, can I use it somehow to install the OS?

Best Answer

I used the image to create an USB installer stick of macOS High Sierra and reinstalling the OS solved my problem.

Related Solutions

Windows – Disk space recovery after failed bootcamp installation attempt on a fusion drive – High Sierra

I usually do not answer questions involving Fusion Drives. Primarily, because there are others who have more experience than me.

I believe the commands below will return the free space to your "Macintosh HD" volume.

diskutil  eraseVolume  free  n  disk0s4
diskutil  resizevolume  disk0s3  650M
diskutil  unmount  disk0s3
diskutil  cs  resizePV  119FE525-BFA6-446A-A688-8DC77BD89687  0
diskutil  cs  resizeLV  C079CDA8-4E21-4BCC-B281-41BA78F50486  0

MacOS – Erased Windows partition with Disk Utility still can see the EFI boot on the boot screen

The drives shown as (disk image) are temporary drives stored in RAM. These drive will disappear when you leave Recovery mode.

Chasing Ghosts

You have successfully removed all windows partitions from your disks, but you have not yet removed all files added during your installation of Windows. What is left are files in your EFI partitions. The ghost is being caused by the file efi/boot/bootx64.efi stored in one of the EFI partitions.

Open a Terminal window and enter the following command.
```
sudo diskutil mount /dev/disk0s1
```
From a Finder window, open the EFI disk. Next open the EFI folder. Remove any folders named Boot or Microsoft
When finished, enter the command below.
```
sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk0s1
```
Enter the following command.
```
sudo diskutil mount /dev/disk1s1
```
From a Finder window, open the EFI disk. Next open the EFI folder. Remove any folders named Boot or Microsoft
When finished, enter the command below.
```
sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s1
```

If you booted to Recovery Mode or wish to just use a Terminal window, then enter the commands given below.

sudo  diskutil  mount  disk0s1
cd  /Volumes/EFI
rm  -fr  EFI/Windows
rm  -fr  EFI/Boot
cd  /
sudo  diskutil  unmount disk0s1
sudo  diskutil  mount  disk1s1
cd /Volumes/EFI
rm  -fr  EFI/Windows
rm  -fr  EFI/Boot
cd  /
sudo  diskutil  unmount  disk1s1