How do I restore MacBook after accidental hard drive deletion?

My hard drive was deleted by accident by nephew, now MacBook can’t boot up. Have 3 smaller screens in window, one boot something one exec looks like the terminal screen lady NVRAM.


Is there anyway to get back to startup disk?


please advise



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Posted on Feb 26, 2025 12:12 PM

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Posted on Feb 27, 2025 5:06 AM

Your data was deliberately deleted. This was not an accident. Too many steps, and a great big warning.


Hopefully your gremlin did not also clobber your Time Machine, if you had Time Machine running.


Here are the articles for the general sequence, booting Recovery on your particular Mac, and restoring:


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Feb 27, 2025 5:06 AM in response to macnewbie25

Your data was deliberately deleted. This was not an accident. Too many steps, and a great big warning.


Hopefully your gremlin did not also clobber your Time Machine, if you had Time Machine running.


Here are the articles for the general sequence, booting Recovery on your particular Mac, and restoring:


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Feb 27, 2025 1:32 AM in response to macnewbie25

Try restarting and holding Option (⌥) to check if any bootable drives appear. If your startup disk is missing, you might need to create a bootable macOS installer on a USB drive using another Mac.

As for getting back to your original files, if you had Time Machine backups, you can restore everything after reinstalling macOS. If not, data recovery software like Stellar Data Recovery or Photorec for Mac might help retrieve lost files.

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How do I restore MacBook after accidental hard drive deletion?

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