Mac Internal Drive Uninitialized | Macbook Pro 13 (mid 2010)

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Mac Internal Drive Uninitialized | Macbook Pro 13 (mid 2010)

Bit of background - the whole problem began with the mac being really slow and unresponsive. I thought it might be a good idea to wipe everything clean, and reinstall a fresh copy of High Sierra. So, restarted and went into Recovery mode, and then disk utility. I could not erase my internal Macintosh HD - the error said it could not unmount it. Same error when trying First Aid too.

From here, it went really dark. Tried internet recovery but it gave an error -2002F. As I didn't have another mac at the time, read an article somewhere to download a High Sierra image from a link (not apple store) and using TransMac to create a bootable - which was a mistake, because I was able to install that OS but it started throwing random errors and was unresponsive as well. From this point onwards, Mac started to get stuck at the apple logo with progress bar at 100% and I waited 24 hours, and it still did nothing. An SMC Reset fixed that issue, and it logged me into my OS which is again the corrupted one.

So, now tried internet recovery from another Wifi, which took me further only to throw an error before install began saying Permission Denied. I also managed to find another mac and download a genuine High Sierra and make a bootable out of it, but when I went to install it, same error - Permission Denied.

Many more hours of research, and I found out by typing the command (lsof|grep 'Volumes/Macintosh HD') that there were two processes running - 169 and 197 (see image below) . Killed them both.

And then was able to force unmount the disk via terminal (diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk0). However when I went to erase by trying the command (diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ Mac /dev/disk0), it threw the error - 69825: Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed. (image below).

After which I ran the following command (gpt -v destrory /dev/disk0) with the intention it might clear off the partitioning, I guess I was wrong because now I do not have a Macintosh HD in Disk Utility, and the internal Disk says 'Uninitialized' (image below)

So yeah, that's where I am after 5 days of troubleshooting - pretty much nowhere! I am not a mac genius, but I know things. But this is getting too complicated now. The other weird thing I found is when I type the command (diskutil list), I get this long list going upto /dev/disk21 and all of them are disk images. (see below). Not sure if that has anything to do with it.

I could still go on googling, but I think I might have reached the saturation level of my brain. I would really appreciate if someone could help me here. I am assuming the next step would be to initialize the disk? maybe. Atleast that's the way I am thinking of proceeding unless I get some help here.

Lastly, this could very well be a hardware fault which I might have caused due to my troubleshooting step - I'd never know i guess. But this is an old machine, and I'm willing to get my hands dirty here to find a way out.

Thanks for your time.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Dec 11, 2018 6:00 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

John Galt

Level 10

140,764 points

Dec 12, 2018 11:15 AM in response to manuviswan

Software can't fix broken hardware. Replacing the disk drive will cost less than $50 US and take perhaps a half hour of your time. No one likes to keep old hardware working more than I do but traditional rotating hard disk drives should be considered wear items that will require eventual replacement.

Also, the image i posted (in original post) where you can see upto disk21 - is that a problem? coz that looks like the disk is all cluttered up?

I have seen it before. As far as I have been able to determine, they tend to be created as a consequence of using various non-Apple "disk management" or similarly categorized "utility" products. Other than occupy a negligible amount of space that would otherwise remain usable, those partitions or volumes do not cause any problem in and of themselves.

On the other hand, the installation and use of such non-Apple "utility" products do not provide any benefit. What's worse is that they have been correlated with premature disk failure. One cannot reasonably claim that is what caused an eight year old HD to fail though. Its time was up. Replace it.

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Answer 2

manuviswan Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 11, 2018 9:21 PM in response to John Galt

Thanks for the reply John,

I tried the following commands to initialize the disk

diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ Mac disk0

diskutil partitiondisk disk0 JHFS+ Mac 100%

gives me the same error (image below)

Is there any other way to initialize this disk?

Also, the image i posted (in original post) where you can see upto disk21 - is that a problem? coz that looks like the disk is all cluttered up?

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Answer 3

John Galt

Level 10

140,764 points

Dec 11, 2018 8:17 PM in response to manuviswan

I am assuming the next step would be to initialize the disk?

Yes.

- the whole problem began with the mac being really slow and unresponsive.

Those symptoms as well as the results of your subsequent actions are 100% consistent with HDD failure. Go ahead and initialize it, but that disk is 100% certain to fail again, probably in a very short period of time. The only way to fix that problem is to replace the disk. They are not expensive.

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Answer 4

manuviswan Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 12, 2018 11:25 AM in response to John Galt

Thanks John. I guess that's the only logical step from here. Gonna try taking the hdd out and connecting it to another mac as an external hdd via SATA cable, and see if I can erase it. Will update this thread, as it might help someone else with similar issue.

But either way, it is going to be a replacement I guess, considering I don't really care about the contents on the disk, and the fact that the harddisk has probably lived its life span.

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Answer 5

manuviswan Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 13, 2018 1:00 PM in response to John Galt

Hey, so an update on this. I managed to take out my HDD, and connect it as an external on another mac, and was actually able to format it clean without errors. I mounted it back and began the installation, only to give me an error at the end which I don't exactly remember what it was, had lot of numbers in it - looked weird and at this point I had kinda given up. I also had few old hard-disks lying around, but couldn't install on them as they seemed kinda faulty too (all of'em were old).

So, I believe this is not a software issue. Its either a faulty hard-disk or a faulty SATA cable, either way there's no point in trying to fix it - not worth the time. Will be going for a new SSD by the looks of it.

I hope this thread can prove helpful to anyone having similar issues. Thanks John for your help.

Closing this thread.

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Answer 6

John Galt

Level 10

140,764 points

Dec 12, 2018 11:32 AM in response to manuviswan

That's a good idea, and will also obviate another potential cause... the SATA cable. It's easily replaced too.

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Mac Internal Drive Uninitialized | Macbook Pro 13 (mid 2010)

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