Macintosh HD Disk missing with no admin user?!

Well you just found one of the many new ways of permanently losing access to your data on these newer Macs if you don't have a current backup. Unfortunately there is no way to access data on the internal drive now, because no matter how you try to boot or access the data you will need to authenticate with the security enclave which you cannot do apparently. All the data on the internal SSD is hardware encrypted which is why you need to authenticate in order to unlock it.

The only way to recover your Mac so you can use it now is by performing a firmware "Restore" which will reset the security enclave chip & firmware as well as push a clean version of macOS onto the internal SSD. This procedure requires access to another Mac running macOS 12.4+ (at least last time I check, since the OS requirement has increased at times). If you don't have access to such a Mac, then you will need to take the Mac to Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider for assistance in this procedure. This procedure will destroy all data on the internal SSD.

Revive or restore a Mac with Apple silicon using Apple Configurator - Apple Support

This is just one of many new ways people can permanently lose access to their data on these new Macs. People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. Apple provides the Time Machine backup software for free with macOS...all a user needs is to purchase an external drive 2 or 3 times larger than the internal SSD.

Hey there!

No worries, this can be resolved, most likely without having to reinstall, or even do a full factory reset.

But first, have done anything in Disk Utility while in recovery mode? Or are you still able to log into your user account?

I’ve seen the error that there are no admin accounts when attempting to perform functions while in recovery mode, but this is usually when the drive has been erased.

I think most likely your issue would not happen in a new user account, in which, a reinstall would most likely not resolve the issue you’re having.

Could you please confirm? Glad to help out if I can!

Hey again! Well that’s not promising, but when you startup to recovery, (On M1-M2 while off, press and hold the power button and continue holding to see startup options), Besides the “Options” icon, do you even see “Macintosh HD” or anything else?

Thanks! So you do actually get to a log in screen when starting normally! Just need to confirm that. Or if you shut down and start up normally it just asks you to select a disk? (Usually that may be because there is no startup disk and the drive was erased).