Recovery stuck on "examining volumes"

You can use a bootable Parted Magic USB drive which is just a Linux utility disk with a customized app which makes it easy to access the SSD's built-in hardware secure erase feature. The last free version of Parted Magic is available from the MajorGeeks' link here. If the free version doesn't boot your Mac, then you will need to get the current paid version or use Linux if you are familiar with Linux. You can use the downloaded .iso file as a source for Etcher (Mac/Windows/Linux) which can "burn" the .iso file to USB.

Option Boot the Parted Magic USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". There should be an icon on the Parted Magic desktop for erasing drives. Within this app there are several different methods to erase a drive, but only one of them will utilize the built-in hardware feature which will reset the SSD to factory defaults. You want to select the "ATA Secure Erase" option which will prompt you to sleep & wake the computer as well as prompt you to create a temporary password. Keep this temporary password simple like "abc" since it is only used to activate the hardware feature. If the secure erase fails or is interrupted for any reason you will need to use this password to disable the ATA security feature or the SSD will permanently locked and unusable. The ATA Secure Erase can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes to complete. Make sure a laptop is plugged into the charger.

Here is a Parted Magic article with details for the ATA Secure Erase for the current paid version of Parted Magic. While the look of the old app is different the procedure is basically the same.

https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/

Keep in mind not all Apple SSDs have this built-in hardware feature. This will also only work on 2015 and earlier Apple computers & SSDs.

If you have any external drives attached, disconnect them before going into Recovery.

Sorry, I missed that about trying bootable usb.

Did you install the SSD yourself? If so, you might check to see that the ribbon cable is firmly seated and hasn't come loose. If not fulling installed when you put it in, the heat/cool cycles could work the cable just loose enough to cause odd problems.

This was all very helpful. I am happy to report that all critical data was recovered. I used the GSmartControl as described, and DDrescue to clone the drive byte-by-byte bypassing the kernel cache. I inspected the drive with Disk Utility on my Mac, and used TestDisk to find that the partition map was corrupted. I was able to re-write the map, and discover the missing partition. I used M3 Data Recovery (which can pull files from encrypted APFS) to pull my entire user directory. Everything works; the directory structure is intact, and all of the file meta-data appears correct. I have yet to find a critical file that was corrupted.

Thank you for your advice.

Incidentally, I did do regular backups at my workplace, but Covid has me working from home. The virus has impacts we don't necessarily see right away. Had I lost the drive I would have lost two months of work. That's still not trivial. As it stands I lost 3 days of productivity, but learned a lot about file recovery in that time.

Stephen Wicks wrote:

Do you mind taking a look at this? It's the HD from a 2015 Macbook Pro retina display borked during a software update yesterday morning. 10.15.5 update ran, but never completed. Now the drive won't mount. Recovery via OS Recover gets to "Examining Volumes..." and will sit there for hours. I made a Knoppix Linux USB drive using Etcher as you described. This is what I get. The data on this drive is crucial and I have no backup that is recent.

<GSMARTCONTROL device report.log>

Lots of Read errors with that SSD. Personally I would try to use Knoppix and the command line utility GNU ddrescue to perform a bit for bit clone of the SSD to another drive of equal or larger size making sure to use the log option so you can resume an interrupted clone. Knoppix includes ddrescue. This is your best chance of accessing the data yourself since GNU ddrescue doesn't require a mounted drive, but you must be extremely careful in selecting the drive IDs for the source & destination drives or you could overwrite the data you are trying to recover.

You will need access to another Mac to access the contents of the clone drive although it may be possible to mount an unencrypted drive with Linux using the command line. I've done it a couple of times, but I would have to locate the instructions for you. I've never been successful in mounting a Filevaulted drive with Linux although it should be possible and I've seen instructions for it.

If this doesn't work, then you will need to contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack. Both vendors provide free estimates and are recommended by Apple.

In the future make sure to always have regular verified working backups since SSDs can fail at any time without any warning signs as you have just discovered. Plus it is impossible to recover accidentally deleted data from an SSD.

Once you've recovered your data or given up with recovery efforts you can try to resurrect the SSD by resetting the SSD to factory defaults which will also erase the SSD. I've fixed a lot of SSD issues doing this including a couple of Apple SSDs, but it is not always guaranteed to be successful, plus some Apple SSDs do not support this hardware feature. Let me know if you want instructions.

Covid19 sure does make things interesting.

I'm glad you were successful in recovering everything. You were lucky the SSD was still responding properly which is very unusual with SSD failures. I think resetting this SSD to factory defaults would most likely fix the SSD to work normally again. Even if you opt to replace the SSD now so you can get back to work you may be able to resurrect it for use as an external drive or as a spare. You would most likely know right away if the reset fixes the drive. If you are interested in trying to reset the SSD let me know and I can provide instructions for using a Linux utility assuming the SSD supports this hardware reset feature.

Thanks for the follow up so it may help others in a similar situation.

Do you mind taking a look at this? It's the HD from a 2015 Macbook Pro retina display borked during a software update yesterday morning. 10.15.5 update ran, but never completed. Now the drive won't mount. Recovery via OS Recover gets to "Examining Volumes..." and will sit there for hours. I made a Knoppix Linux USB drive using Etcher as you described. This is what I get. The data on this drive is crucial and I have no backup that is recent.

I downloaded the Knoppix image and made a bootable USB drive, but it boots in German, and the text is tiny on a Macbook Pro 25 2017. How do you make it boot in english and make the screen resolution readable?

There are two versions of Knoppix to download...one defaults to English and one defaults to German. You can tell them apart by looking for the "EN" & "DE" near the end of the file name for English & German (Deutsch). Normally you could boot the German one using English but because of how the Apple hardware works we never get to see the early Knoppix boot menu where we can easily make this change.

Did you end up finding a solution for this issue? I am running into the same and have not been able to figure out how to solve it.

Hi, I would like you to show me how to reset the Apple SSD. I am in the same situation and think of resetting the SSD may help me.