Hi, I was trying to factory reset my MacBook Air 13" from 2013. Once it turned on after the reset, I saw that the whole system wiped. Tried entering recovery mode by pressing CMD+R, clicked reinstall Mac OS X, BUT! It just doesn't see disks. What can I do?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 15.5
Does your laptop have the original Apple SSD or was it replaced with a third party SSD? A third party SSD requires booting into macOS 10.13+ in order to be able to see & communicate with a third party internal SSD.
You can try booting into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R, but some Macs may still only boot to the older online installer for the version of macOS which shipped with the computer from the factory. And if this laptop has a third party internal SSD installed, then the older installer is too old to work with that third party internal SSD.
If you have access to another working Mac model generally from Late-2009 to mid-2020, then you can use it to create a bootable macOS USB installer.
If your laptop has an original Apple SSD installed internally, then you could also use:
You can confirm the other working Mac is compatible with OS by using the information in the following article (the other "working" Mac can currently be running any version of macOS):
https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility
Just curious why you were wanting to perform a clean install of macOS? If your computer was having problems, then those same issues could be why you are having trouble reinstalling macOS. IIRC, some 2013 laptops had SSDs that were known to fail (Apple had a small free SSD repair program for a while) so perhaps the Apple SSD is failing or has failed completely.
Does your laptop have the original Apple SSD or was it replaced with a third party SSD? A third party SSD requires booting into macOS 10.13+ in order to be able to see & communicate with a third party internal SSD.
You can try booting into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R, but some Macs may still only boot to the older online installer for the version of macOS which shipped with the computer from the factory. And if this laptop has a third party internal SSD installed, then the older installer is too old to work with that third party internal SSD.
If you have access to another working Mac model generally from Late-2009 to mid-2020, then you can use it to create a bootable macOS USB installer.
If your laptop has an original Apple SSD installed internally, then you could also use:
You can confirm the other working Mac is compatible with OS by using the information in the following article (the other "working" Mac can currently be running any version of macOS):
https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility
Just curious why you were wanting to perform a clean install of macOS? If your computer was having problems, then those same issues could be why you are having trouble reinstalling macOS. IIRC, some 2013 laptops had SSDs that were known to fail (Apple had a small free SSD repair program for a while) so perhaps the Apple SSD is failing or has failed completely.
From the recovery, select Disk Utility and see what it says. You may have to use it to reformat the drive.
Note: you posted on the Sequoia (macOS 15) forum, but of course your mac is not capable of running Sequoia. The furthest it can go is Big Sur (macOS 11).
Disk Utility shows me 2 disks, one of them is called OS X Base System, but I couldn't erase it, and can't restore it, first aid says that it appears to be ok
OS X Base System is NOT where you'd want to install. What is the other one? How big is it, and how is it formatted?
MacBook Air doesn't see internal boot disk.
