Macbook 2015 stopped working, is data retrieving still possible?
I still have an old Intel MacBook Pro model from 2015 (purchased in 2016) that I use frequently with macOS Monterey.
Yesterday all of a sudden finder kinda stopped working… I was just browsing on Brave and I wanted to convert currencies and cmd+spacebar didn’t work anymore…
And then it just restarted by itself
It loaded the brave tabs that were open before but worked extremely slow and I basically couldn’t do anything anymore.
Then I shut it down myself.
Then I would try and turn it back on and the first start up screen appeared kinda normal but it took the loading bar very long to get over half of it.
And then when it would finally start up the screen just stayed entirely black where I could move the mousepointer.
I turned it on and off couple more times but it stayed like this.
Then I followed a yt video where I did the following:
At first:
- “Reset NVRAM/PRAM (Intel Macs): Turn on, then immediately hold Option + Command + P + R for about 20 seconds.”
Then I restarted again and I would get the black screen with a Circle with a line
- Then I did "Reset SMC (Intel Macs): Shut down, then hold Shift + Control + Option and the Power button for 10 seconds. Release all keys and turn on the Mac.”
Whenever I boot up my Macbook now, I get the screen with the apple logo at first, then the login screen which has my “icon” and name but with a grey background instead of the usual Monterey background.
Then I type in my password and I get the black screen with circle with line across it
On this screen it also gives the link to apple support and on that page it says support.apple.com/mac/startup:
I followed the steps there:
- Start up from macOS Recovery.
- While in Recovery, use Disk Utility to repair your Mac startup disk.
- If Disk Utility finds no errors or repairs all errors, reinstall macOS from Recovery.
Where I did Diskutility to repair but the problem remained
Also in recovery mode it only shows "APPLE SSD SM012...." (see picture) but not “Macintosh HD” and I don’t see any options for “view” or anything
On the third step on the apple site mentioned above it says to reinstall macOS and that normally data would not get lost, however, when try that (it tries to install OS X El Capitan which is fine IG)
And I have to select the disk where to install OS X I don’t see any options
I wanna stress I didn’t make a back-up (kinda dumb I know) although there’s not really anything super important gone (music library Id like to have back tbf but yh)
The advice I think now is to erase the disk completely, and see if that works but that’s the point:
I don’t wanna do that. It’s less important for me to save this MacBook (Im okay if it’s broken or whatever) but I’d like to retrieve as much data as possible.
Are there still any options left to get this Mac to work as usual?
And if not, is there still possibilities to retrieve data from it (make back-ups)?
Earlier Mac models