MacOS – Can’t see HD in disk utility in recovery mode, but can in OS

disk-utilityhard drivemacosmojaverecovery

I'm pretty new to Macs. I got an iMac Pro in 2017 (grey one) and about 6 months ago it started giving me occasional folder flashing icon on startup.

It also started occasionally forgetting my password and so I'd have to reset it.

I figured maybe the HD got corrupted, so I ran first aid on it in disk utility while logged in. Whenever (after a restart) I run this, it says it's ok. If I immediately re-run it, it says there's corruption and I must run it from recovery mode.

Problem is, whenever I boot into recovery mode, it can't find the disk at all.

Clearly it can find the disk for me to log in and run disk util in the OS.

I don't have any external drives attached.

It's running Mojave 10.14.3 (I tried updating to 10.14.5 and it has a broken download and won't download the remainder of the update – that's yet another issue).

This iMac has hardly been used at all since I bought it.

Thanks for any pointers.

Best Answer

This sounds like a hardware failure; based on my own experience it will turn catastrophic, and probably sooner rather than later. Hopefully you have AppleCare, but:

  • get yourself an external hard drive, and make a Time Machine backup immediately.
  • reset your SMC and reset your NVRAM - if you're lucky, this is just some intermittent / bad state in one of these components and zapping it will restore your mac to full functionality.
  • take your mac to the Genius Bar and describe the symptoms; hopefully they can replace any defective components, but do this after you have a full Time Machine backup!
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