MacOS – Erasing and Partitioning Hard Drive from Internet Recovery

hard driveinternet-recoverymacosrecoverytime-machine

My MacBook Pro (mid 2012) was encrypted and running Yosemite 10.10.3. (The last update with Photos ruined it.) Yesterday, all of a sudden, everything freezes. I forced Shut Down and since then, it´s all gone.

I've tried every single possibility that I could find in apple support discussions forums. Tried to verify, repair, erase and partitioning the HDD and I just can't. The only possible way to boot my Mac is through Internet Recovery (cmd+R, because there´s no Recovery HD left). I tried to erase the HDD through Terminal, with diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ MacintoshHD /dev/disk1*.

*Sometimes the HDD I want to fix is disk0, others disk1…WTF!?

I had no success. I tried to partition it without success. When I try to re-install the OS or restore from Time Machine, the hard disk doesn't appear. It's like it isn't mounted.

Is there a way to solve this without buying a new hard disk? I don't mind going extreme, because I have backups. Is it possible it is something related with the fact that it was encrypted?

UPDATE: I tried every single possibility I could reach (e.g. GParted, TestDisk, tons of different command lines on Terminal, boot from USB, from CD). It seems to be dead.

Some brief example of errors

diskutil repairDisk /dev/disk0
Nonexistent, unknown, or damaged partition map scheme
If you are sure this disk contains a (damaged) APM, MBR, or GPT partition map, you can hereby try to repair it enough to be recognized as a map; another "diskutil repairDisk /dev/disk0" > might then be necessary for further repairs
Proceed? (y/N) y
Error repairing map: MediaKit reports bad partition or no map found (-5324)

diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+
New /dev/disk0 Started erase on disk0
Unmounting disk Error: -69825: Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed

Best Answer

This sounds like your hard drive failed entirely. I see that it's a typical SATA drive in that model. You should be able to open it up and remove the drive, then wire the drive to a desktop and see if it is detected. If it is not, that confirms that the hardware failed.

Comment by OP: It turned out to be a SATA cable failure, see Hard Drive Issues with MacBook Pro 13-inch mid-2012.

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