macOS partitions are disappeared after disk utility first aid hanged for an hour

Question

Level 1

5 points

macOS partitions are disappeared after disk utility first aid hanged for an hour

Thanks for your time.

I have an iMac 27 Late 2012 and have macOS 10.13.6 + macOS 11.6 + boot camp windows 7 installed.

I was on macOS10.13.6 and tried to run first aid on Disk Utility app and I got the message "First Aid needs to temporarily lock the boot volume.You are about to run First Aid against the volume that is currently booted. In order to run First Aid, the boot volume must be frozen. This will result in apps not responding during the operation. This is completely normal and apps will begin responding when the operation has completed. "

Then It hanged for about an hour and no respond from computer even mouse was not moving. I was low on storage too about 6 GB was left approximately.

So I turned off the mac and switched on and used "option" key while restarting to get to choosing startup disks and use "command R" to get to recovery mode and run the first aid from recovery mode.

When got to Disk Utility in recovery mode i saw disk0s2 can not be mounted!

I got through many articles and did following commands and got the following results and still I have the problem where the macOS partitions are disappeared:

diskutil list

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 209.0 GB disk0s2

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_partition_scheme *1.2 GB disk1

1: Apple_partition_map 30.7 KB disk1s1

2: Apple_HFS Mac OS X Base System 1.2 GB disk1s2

and once I ran code for gpt -r show /dev/disk0 I got below

409640 1544923096 2 GPT part - FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF

**this code is written by myself not copied and pasted**

i ran into a youtube video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXfkSWLO380 )and in order to remove the FFFFFFFF ....

I ran this code

gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk0

then it gave error disk resource busy and what I did I unmount the disk and ran again and it was successfully unmounted after removed

and i cannot run the next code which is

gpt add -i 2 -b 409640 -s 1544923096 -t 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

first right after this code before restarting i got "255" infront of gpt part but after i restarted the computer when i run the following code i get the following result:

gpt -r show /dev/disk0

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

start size index contents

0 1 MBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 1544923096

1545332736 408190976 2 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

1953523712 1423

1953525135 32 Sec GPT table

1953525167 1 Sec GPT header

I needed to stop trying and error and i hope the data is there and with few changes i can access them. as of now only boot camp is showing up .

Posted on Feb 23, 2022 12:04 PM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

60,758 points

Mar 10, 2022 2:04 PM in response to Mr_MJD

You need to be booting into macOS 11.x+ in order to properly see the different partitions, Containers, and file systems. The pictures show you booting a very old OS which does not understand the newer drive layouts or the APFS file systems used by macOS 10.13+. While you may be able to use macOS 10.13 to repair or attempt data recovery, you will have much better success by booting into the highest version of macOS you have used which is v11.x Big Sur. Even macOS 10.13 - 10.15 are not able to properly recognize the new drive layouts used by macOS 11.x Big Sur.

FYI, macOS 11.x Big Sur is not officially supported by Apple on a 2012 Mac which does make things more difficult when trying to fix things here.

If you cannot boot into macOS 10.15 using Internet Recovery Mode (Command + Option + R), then try creating a bootable macOS USB installer so that you can properly work on the iMac. You may even want to install macOS to an external USB drive so you have the resources of a full version of macOS to work with instead of the limited OS provided by a macOS installer.

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

Is your Mac supposed to have a Fusion Drive or is it only supposed to have a hard drive? To me the drive layout looks like a possible broken Fusion Drive. Or your hard drive is failing. Both can explain what happened. Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. If you can boot into a full macOS drive, then you can try running DriveDx to check the health of the drive(s) since the diagnostics don't detect many types of drive failures. Post the complete text report(s) here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. If you cannot boot into a full macOS to run DriveDx, then I can provide instructions for creating and using a bootable Linux USB stick to check the health of the drive(s).

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Answer 2

Mr_MJD Author

Level 1

5 points

Mar 10, 2022 3:26 AM in response to BDAqua

@BDAqua

Thanks for the info

I did run StellarDataRecovery on my disk.

found the list below.

then Once I chose Lost volume 38 it got stopped in the middle again restarted and next time after restart I chose Lost volume 39 and everything is found!

I highly recommend StellarDataRecovery

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

245,507 points

Feb 23, 2022 3:52 PM in response to Mr_MJD

I doubt I can help, but I'd install OS to an external drive, then...

Thanks to Kurt Lang…

I had to recently recover a file I deleted (about a month ago). FileSalvage ran, but the way it accesses the drive to look for deleted items is incredibly slow. My version of Data Rescue was too old to run in Monterey. But it also suffers from the hours long process of examining a drive.

SubRosaSoft (FileSalvage) folded. If you go to subrosasoft.com, this is all you get. A very simple few lines of text:

Thank you to all of our customers over the years. SubRosaSoft has regretfully closed up shop. Inquiries regarding purchase of our domain or software assets may be directed to mhurlow@subrosasoft.com.

Data Rescue is still available, but is now subscription only. No way was I paying those prices for something I use less than once a year. That sent me on a search for something better.

I haven't tried Stellar's product, so I can't comment on that one. But I did test Disk Drill.

It'll do three free recoveries before you have to pay for it. But the kicker is the speed. I ran it and it said it was ready in less than 30 seconds (if it was even that long). Since every recovery software I had ever used before took a minimum of 8 hours to look through a 1 TB drive, I figured that couldn't be right. So I set if for a deep scan. Also done in less than 30 seconds. Easily found and recovered my file.

I don't know what methods their app uses to locate deleted items, but I didn't hesitate to purchase the full version for something that works that fast.

"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."

They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...

http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm

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Answer 4

Mr_MJD Author

Level 1

5 points

Feb 23, 2022 7:51 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks a lot for the reply 🙏🙏

I guess there’s much easier approach to change the MBR numbers and get access to the hard drive.

on 750 GB partition of the SSD (AFPS) there are two partitions on e for High Sierra and one for Catalina

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Answer 5

Mr_MJD Author

Level 1

5 points

Feb 23, 2022 11:55 PM in response to Mr_MJD

today i found out about this code so I post here it could certainly help to rectify the Issue. Thanks

sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=1000204886016; sectorsize=512; blocks=1953525168

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 1953525167

start size index contents

0 1 MBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 1544923096

1545332736 408190976 2 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

1953523712 1423

1953525135 32 Sec GPT table

1953525167 1 Sec GPT header

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Answer 6

Mr_MJD Author

Level 1

5 points

Feb 24, 2022 4:10 PM in response to BDAqua

Honestly everything is on hold. i try not to change anything further without expert's comments :)

My data is valuable to me. I know I did not format it. and with few changes in MBR or/and GPT can access the data :)

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Answer 7

Mr_MJD Author

Level 1

5 points

Mar 29, 2022 2:36 AM in response to BDAqua

Actually the files with names are back, and all small files are healthy back, and about big files many of them missing. like virtual machines VMware fusion & Microsoft outlook files are corrupted and can't load old data

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