Macbook Pro (encrypted disk) hangs during login after some "low hdd space near-crash"

My macbook almost crashed when it was low on HDD space. I emptied about 10% of HDD, but still there were some glitches (some apps couldn't start up and so on), so I restarted the laptop. Restart didn't go well, resulted in some black screen with errors and now it hangs during login (both in normal and in safe mode). I booted up in recovery mode but disk utility hangs on "Loading disks", the picture is similar to https://i.stack.imgur.com/6xE6X.jpg. When I run diskutil list from terminal it stucks on showing info about /dev/disk2 (synthesized) - see photo https://i.imgur.com/hCQktX1.jpg. Afaik, the disk was encrypted.


Any suggestion what can I try to restore it before attempting reinstall? (The only suggestion I found was killing fsck process - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7281543 but there were no such in my case). Thanks a lot for all the ideas!

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.14

Posted on Mar 9, 2019 1:50 PM

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3 replies

Mar 9, 2019 2:47 PM in response to ykus

Actually, "Reinstall macOS" from recovery mode also doesn't work: when I click "continue" as shown on picture in https://support.apple.com/en-ke/HT204904, "continue" button gets disabled but nothing happens. I guess it's because it tries to access the disk to show options where to install the mac os, but that "/dev/disk2 (synthesized)" has somehow so corruped structure that it hangs.

Mar 28, 2019 6:57 AM in response to ykus

UPDATE:


The reason was hardware fault of the SSD on a only 16-months old laptop (macbook pro 13" late 2017). The fault caused the data corruption to the level that it wasn't possible to mount the disk and the "Disk utility" used in recovery mode couldn't even start up. Btw, It speaks a lot about the quality of the software that can be made non-functional just by disk data corruption.


Anyways, the solution: get a clean install of a recent mac os on the external drive using a working computer (fortunately I had the old Macbook Air that still worked without problems). Connect it to the broken laptop and boot from the external disk (press and hold the ⌥ key), boot from it and then run Disk Utility. This way macOS/ Disk Utility don't attempt to automatically mount the totally messed up internal disk and it's possible to just format it from the scratch (you need to switch view to "Show all devices" in Disk utility), select the physical disk and erase it. Now you can disconnect the external drive, reboot in internet recovery mode, install the recent macOS. Needless to say that it'd be good to check the health status of your disk (i.e. SMART params) - in my case it was a hardware malfunctioning that led to data corruption and overall "disk health" decline.

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Macbook Pro (encrypted disk) hangs during login after some "low hdd space near-crash"

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