You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

MacBook Air file system seems to have disappeared

My 13” MacBook Air (2012 or 2013 model) with a 500 GB SSD hung the other day and when I rebooted, it came up in Mac OSX Utilities, apparently from the Recovery Partition (wherever that is). It offered to recover from my Time Machine, but could never find a disk to recover to. Similarly, Disk Utilities also couldn’t find a disk to repair.

I did the R boot and got the same Utilities program with the same results (no disk).

I made a bootable OS (Mojave) Install drive to boot from, but again could not find a disk to install to.

My IT friend suggested that the SSD was dead and I might try replacing it. For ~$250 I can put in a 1TB SSD it appears. But if it doesn’t work I have a $250 SSD and a dead computer, so I thought I’d ask here if there is any way I can explore further or if it sounds like the SSD Is really the culprit.


Thanks!

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Nov 7, 2020 11:00 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 7, 2020 3:30 PM

While diagnosing hardware problems is impossible on an online forum it sounds like every dead storage device I've ever seen. Try installing Mac OS on an external drive and booting from that to test your Macbook Air How to select a different startup disk - Apple Support

Similar questions

2 replies

MacBook Air file system seems to have disappeared

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.