Internal Drive not recognized on mac

Hi Allon14,

You should shut down your Mac immediately and get it inspected by a qualified technician, or by an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.

Just curious, what year was your 13" MacBook Pro made in? Does it have the M1 [Pro/Max] chip?

Thanks for that info! Fortunately, your Mac doesn't use hardware encryption, and thus your data is likely recoverable. Additionally, you should be able to remove the internal drive if needed.

If you are completely confident that the inside of your Mac is dry, and that everything functions as expected, you could try these steps:

1. Power on your Mac while holding down the Option key. Release it when you have the option to choose a Wi-Fi network.
2. If your internal SSD appears (likely "Macintosh HD"), select it, hold down the Control key, then click the circular arrow to set it as your default startup disk. This should resolve the issue.

If the above steps don't work, you could try starting up in Recovery Mode (hold down Command-R at startup) and check if the internal SSD appears in Disk Utility. If it does, mount Macintosh HD (and Macintosh HD - Data if it appears), and run First Aid on both of them.

All it takes is just a single drop of liquid on the right spot and it can cause great damage. Liquid can get in anywhere.

Is the laptop using the original Apple SSD or was a third party SSD installed? The original Apple SSD has most of the SSD encased in epoxy so unless the liquid hit the contacts or an important circuit on the Logic Board for the SSD, the SSD likely survived. Assuming the SSD just did not fail at that precise moment. SSDs are susceptible to power fluctuations which can brick an SSD. Third party SSDs are usually not as well protected.

An unexpected shutdown may just have corrupted the file system or the OS.

Third party SSDs also pose a problem when booting into Internet Recovery Mode as you need to boot into macOS 10.13+ in order for the OS to actually see a third party SSD. Many times booting into Internet Recovery Mode will only boot the Mac into the online OS installer which originally shipped on the Mac from the factory. Unfortunately for a 2015 MBPro the OS which shipped from the factory is 10.11 so it won't recognize a third party NVMe SSD.

If you have an original Apple SSD, then you could remove it and install it into an OWC Envoy Pro Enclosure to connect the SSD to another Mac externally. However, this is not an option if you have an OWC NVMe SSD since there are no enclosures available (OWC warns that their enclosures do not work with the OWC Aura SSDs and will likely damage both the OWC SSD & the enclosure). If the laptop is using a standard M.2 SSD with a special adapter, then you just need a compatible M.2 SSD enclosure.

You should always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. FYI, it is impossible to recover accidentally deleted data from an SSD after the Trash has been emptied. Plus an SSD can fail at any time without any warning signs (even a brand new SSD).