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cmhansen1269 Author

Level 1

18 points

2012 MacBook Pro not seeing the hard drive

My laptop was sitting open and on. I wasn’t using it at the time, although I had been about 30 minutes before, and the screen went blank. After a bit the folder with a ? started flashing. I restarted in recovery mode and went into disk utility and clicked verify. Repair was not available. It my hard drive with a capacity of only 1.5 gigs but I installed a new 500 gig HD about 2 years ago. Verify did nothing so I decided to bite the bullet and restore from a backup(over a year old). When I got to the point of selecting a volume to restore to there was no option. It was not seeing the HD at all. At that point I opened it up to make sure no connection had come loose. I found nothing. Any suggestions on what to do next are greatly appreciated.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Nov 8, 2020 9:52 PM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,332 points

Posted on Nov 9, 2020 7:00 PM

With newer versions of macOS Disk Utility defaults to a volume view instead of a device view. Within Disk Utility click on "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. If the physical drive doesn't appear on the left pane, then the drive is most likely bad. If you have the 13" model, then there is a good possibility that the hard drive SATA Cable is defective. You can verify if this is the case by removing the drive and connecting it externally using a USB to SATA Adapter, drive dock, or enclosure. You can get a replacement hard drive SATA cable from OWC.

If you happened to boot into a really old version of the macOS installer, then it won't recognize the newer APFS volumes used by macOS 10.13+, although you should be able to see the physical drive.

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2012 MacBook Pro not seeing the hard drive

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