SSD crashed on me; not sure if it's the drive or the Hard Disk cable inside. Need my data badly!
Yesterday when I was typing out an email, my 13" MBP (mid-2012) freezed. I force restarted the machine, and then it started with a flashing question mark which was inside a folder. After freaking out for some minutes, I did a NVRAM and SMC reset, nothing happened. After researching about the issue, I found out that it means it's not detecting the drive to boot-up.
After a few more google searches and reading a few answers on Apple Support Communities, I reckoned there are two possibilities:
1. SSD is corrupted, in this case, my extremely important data is lost forever.
2. Hard Disk Cable is faulty, in this case, the data is safe, and just changing the cable will solve the issue.
> Also, I learned that MBP 2012 models are prone to this issue, and Apple started a Hard Disk Cable Replacement Program, which I think ended in 2015. This is making it more likely that it's a cable issue, and this is giving me some hope that the data can be recovered!
Here's what I did, till now. I installed OS X Lion (through Internet Recovery) on my external HD, and booted up my Mac, it worked. I can see desktop and finder. I thought I'd first boot up from External, and extract my data from internal, transfer it to external, and then do a clean install. But when I go to "Go -> Computer' from Finder, I see this. It is not detecting my Internal HD there (Swiss is my External), but when I open Disk Utility, I can see the Drive. Repair Disk results are fine too. The Repair Disk result of the storage partition of my Internal SSD i.e 'disk0s2' has this error.
The SSD is still under Warranty. My only concern at this point is the data. Is it possible to extract the data at this point?
I really appreciate the help!
MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.14
