MacOS thinks partition has different format and wont read/mount it
I have an external SSD which used to have multiple partitions. Last night I was formatting some partitions for other uses and nothing happened to my other main partitions.
This morning a partition was no longer supported by Catalina 10.15.7 on my MacBook Pro 13 2017.
My partition is disk2s2, used to be formatted in exFAT for compatibility, and it's using GPT.
Diskutil cannot fix it with first aid.
Diskutil:
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk2
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1
2: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF 500.0 GB disk2s2
3: Linux Filesystem 250.0 GB disk2s3
4: Apple_APFS Container disk3 250.0 GB disk2s4
fdisk:
Disk: /dev/disk2 geometry: 121601/255/63 [1953525168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 1953525167] <Unknown ID>
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
Disk: /dev/disk2s2 geometry: 60787/255/63 [976556032 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: F4 1012 244 52 - 1012 244 52 [4109694196 - 4109694196] SpeedStor
2: F4 1012 244 52 - 1012 244 52 [4109694196 - 4109694196] SpeedStor
3: F4 1012 244 52 - 1012 244 52 [4109694196 - 4109694196] SpeedStor
4: F4 1012 244 52 - 1012 244 52 [4109694196 - 4109694196] SpeedStor
GPT show:
start size index contents
0 1 PMBR
1 1 Pri GPT header
2 32 Pri GPT table
34 6
40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
409640 2008
411648 976556032 2 GPT part - FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF
976967680 2048
976969728 488275968 3 GPT part - 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4
1465245696 1056
1465246752 488278376 4 GPT part - 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
1953525128 7
1953525135 32 Sec GPT table
1953525167 1 Sec GPT header
Windows cannot open it either, and it doesn't give me any options to interact with.
I used a software for windows called Active Partition Recovery, and it seems that it recognizes the partition as exFAT, and it doesn't believe it is damaged. All the GPT data, tables look right. It also cannot recover it because "it exists as a live logical drive and the partition table contains the partition information".
I also used EaseUS Partition Master on Windows, and it will see the partition as "Other". It can't work with it in any way. Using this software I deleted the other 2 partitions I had, and now I have my partition and empty space on the ssd.
New diskutil:
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk2
1: Windows Recovery 500.0 GB disk2s1
Fdisk is the same.
New GPT show.
start size index contents
0 1 PMBR
1 1 Pri GPT header
2 32 Pri GPT table
34 411614
411648 976556032 1 GPT part - DE94BBA4-06D1-4D40-A16A-BFD50179D6AC
976967680 976557455
1953525135 32 Sec GPT table
1953525167 1 Sec GPT header
Before all of this, the SSD will only show the other partitions. Now when I plug it in with only the exFAT partition I get the error "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." which didn't show before.
Running first aid will show:
Running First Aid on “Samsung Portable SSD T5 Media” (disk2)
Checking prerequisites
Checking the partition list
Problems were found with the partition map, which might prevent booting
Partition map check failed because no slices were found. : (-69770)
Operation failed…
The data is there. These recovery programs see it, but they are all useless. I don't want to recover every file and lose the folder hierarchy, so I want to somehow fix this reading problem...
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15