Recover unmountable APFS partition

I had recently purchased a new HDD dock, after 24h of testing I felt safe to add on the two drives to its bays, unfortunately within the next 24h the dock corrupted my partitions making them unmountable. Great.


One of the drives I recovered correctly being HFS+ and have migrated that data over to a new drive. The second however the data is on an APFS partition, and recovering that from what I see has been impossible so I am hoping someone can help.


First off I have dded all my data from the corrupted drive to a larger drive to do all my recovery attempts so my data is safe if I muck something up and can always dd it all again. I have tried TestDisk but either am lost or am being unsuccessful, I've tried DMDE which finds the partition and files but I am hoping to restore the partition before I have to go the route of paying and recovering the individual files.


Following guides and such online has either left me lost or without success. I'll attach images from diskutil, gdisk, TestDisk, and DMDE and hopefully someone can guide me the rest of the way. I know the data is not damaged because nothing was luckily ever written to the drives while in the new dock.


Diskutil:

gdisk:

TestDisk:

DMDE:

I hope someone can help, thanks!

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.0

Posted on Sep 13, 2021 6:01 PM

Reply

Similar questions

4 replies

Sep 13, 2021 7:52 PM in response to xDark_Punkx

There are plenty of utilities commercially available that can recover from HFS+ partitions. But APFS has not yet been well documented so I don't know of any commercial (or Unix) utilities that can effectively recover from a damaged APFS disk. Of course sometimes Apple's Disk Utility can, but even it is fairly limited.


Maybe an expert like HWTech will see this and respond, but I believe the answer for APFS is usually to erase/reformat and recover from a backup if Disk Utility can't fix it. Sounds grim but I don't know what else to suggest.


I'm almost afraid to ask, do you have backups or copies of the files on that disk?

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Recover unmountable APFS partition

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