Unrecognised hard drive

Question

Level 1

8 points

Unrecognised hard drive

I recently upgraded my OS on my mid 2011 MacBook Air; all looked fine but after it restarted I got a flashing folder with a question mark in it. I can boot in Internet recovery mode, but in terminal and disk utility I can't see any hard drive. If I install the OS to a USB drive and boot from that it also wont show any hard drive other than the USB. I've tried resetting the PRAM and a few other configurations but nothing seems to work. I know hard drives can die, I just thought it was quite a coincidence happening as I was performing a system update and hope there's something I could do without replacing the SSD. Thanks in advance for any advice or help!

iPhoto '11, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Jul 23, 2016 12:58 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jul 23, 2016 1:05 PM in response to abis123

Startup your Mac while holding down the Option key. That should launch the Startup Manager window where you can select the startup disk then click Restart.

How to choose a startup disk on your Mac - Apple Support

Reply

Answer 2

Jul 23, 2016 1:05 PM in response to abis123

If your drive is dead, there isn't much of an option, however, you can use another mac to install OSX on a external drive and run your computer from that. Given there will be huge performance drawbacks as the external drive cannot read write as quickly. That might be useful if you just want to retrieve system information to submit a repair. However, based on that you said, it is possibly that your hard drive has been dislodged as dislodged (loose) hard drives tend to be not detected while corrupted broken hard drives tend to just show erratic storage behaviour (switching from full to empty and then back) before ultimately not responding completely. Did you drop your MacBook in recent time?

Reply

Answer 3

abis123 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 23, 2016 1:09 PM in response to Carolyn Samit

Thanks for the reply Carolyn, didnt show anything at all to select (except Internet Recovery).

Reply

Answer 4

abis123 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 23, 2016 1:11 PM in response to Christopher Lim

Thanks for the response, Christopher - haven't dropped the laptop, it's been sat on my bed running fine up until this. Can an OS update corrupt a hard drive or partition within it so much it would appear in any of the areas I mentioned earlier? If so, is there anything I could do to fix it?

Reply

Answer 5

Jul 23, 2016 1:35 PM in response to abis123

I would say it's unlikely for a corrupted drive to have such characteristics, but I am not an apple technician, so I can not rule out the possibility either. However, seeing as you cannot even see the drive, mounted or not, I do not think there is anything you can do to the drive in terms of software. You can read more about your issue here.

Reply

Answer 6

abis123 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 23, 2016 3:54 PM in response to Christopher Lim

That's a shame, I've had a look over the link you sent and no luck. Think i may try the Apple Store or a shop that specialises in Macs to see if I can get anywhere with it.

Reply