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MacBook Pro mid-2012 laptop Mojave HPFS partition on HDD crashed.

My HDD is divided into 3 partitions: (1) Mojave, (2) Sierra, and (3) Mavericks. I primarily work in the Mojave volume, and it has updated itself to HPFS at some point since upgrading. This morning when I opened the laptop, QuickTime Player was open so I hit CTRL/Q to close it. The whole thing came crashing down: a Restart loop began that always ended with a gray screen and multiple-language lines saying the computer had restarted because of a problem. I finally interrupted the loop by holding down the Option key to get a list of available bootable volumes. Mojave wasn't on that list, so I restarted in Sierra. Then went to Disk Utility (which I'd just been looking at last night while discovering and learning about the whole APFS system), and when I clicked on the line for Mojave it said, "AppleAPFSMedia Unitialized."


So what do I do now to get Mojave back online, and save as much data as possible?


I have Time Machine backups of the Mojave volume from at least 2 days ago, maybe even from last night though I can't be sure until I can get back into that volume. The MacBook Pro.sparsebundle file says it was modified at 8:35am today. That's about the same time that I woke up and discovered I'd left Quicktime Player open, hit CTRL/Q, and started the whole crashing mess. But 2 days ago is good enough for backups - I don't use it as a work computer, there's nothing critical there, and I made new clones of the Sierra and Mavericks partitions with Carbon Copy Cloner last night. (Didn't clone the Mojave partition since the Mojave volume clone on my external hard drive was in the old format, and the one on the MacBook Pro HDD was in HPFS format, so I needed to research what to do before replacing the old clone.)

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on Dec 20, 2020 2:42 PM

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Posted on Dec 20, 2020 6:45 PM

While macOS Sierra can read an APFS volume I am not sure that Sierra's Disk Utility can repair the APFS volume (personally I wouldn't trust it). Instead boot into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R so you can run the Catalina online installer and use the newer version of Disk Utility to attempt repairs to the Mojave volume.


If Disk Utility is unable to repair the volume, then you will need to erase the volume and reinstall/restore from a backup.


If you need to attempt to recover data from that volume, then you can try using a data recovery app such as Photo Rec, TestDisk, Data Rescue, or Stellar. Keep in mind this may be a major task especially if the directory structure has been damaged which means you will end up with thousands of unnamed files to sort through (even when sorting by file types).


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 20, 2020 6:45 PM in response to 2ndGenLynn

While macOS Sierra can read an APFS volume I am not sure that Sierra's Disk Utility can repair the APFS volume (personally I wouldn't trust it). Instead boot into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R so you can run the Catalina online installer and use the newer version of Disk Utility to attempt repairs to the Mojave volume.


If Disk Utility is unable to repair the volume, then you will need to erase the volume and reinstall/restore from a backup.


If you need to attempt to recover data from that volume, then you can try using a data recovery app such as Photo Rec, TestDisk, Data Rescue, or Stellar. Keep in mind this may be a major task especially if the directory structure has been damaged which means you will end up with thousands of unnamed files to sort through (even when sorting by file types).


Dec 22, 2020 8:47 AM in response to HWTech

HWTech - thank you so much. Pointing out that HPFS didn't come into existence until post-Sierra made everything else make sense. Starting up from the cloned Mojave drive on an external HD allowed me to examine the problem (Mojave) partition and determine it could not be salvaged. Thankfully, I'd re-cloned the other 2 partitions the evening before the crash, and I had an updated Time Machine back-up for the Mojave partition from 2 days before the crash, so restoration was a fairly easy process. As a typical non-geek Mac user, I'd not yet heard of the "new" HPFS formatting system until I got in trouble and needed to open Disk Utility to diagnose the problem. (Upgrades have caused me nothing but headaches since Mountain LIon became outdated, so I avoid them at all costs, upgrading only when forced to do so by Apple.)


A 2003 brain injury makes reading technical stuff very tiring now, and I have to conduct research in small doses, so having an expert like yourself reply so quickly to the problem saved me days of hair-pulling frustration. Thank you!

MacBook Pro mid-2012 laptop Mojave HPFS partition on HDD crashed.

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