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Q: Macbook Pro Retina 2014 main drive not appearing after formatting

Hello, first of all, I'd like to describe the entire situation I've been through with my Macbook Pro 15" Retina i7 (Mid 2014)

 

I live in a city in Argentina that's far from any official Apple Service Provider. I bought the Macbook last year around august on BH Photo (brand new) and had it shipped. Approximately 2 months after I started experiencing random crashes and restarts, followed by "GPU panic" errors.

 

I looked up everywhere and followed all the possible solutions I found on Google (including 2 complete re-installs). Then, I found this post: www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/ that described exactly what I was experiencing with my Mac, but it was only for Macbooks until Feb 2013.

 

I contacted Apple and of course they couldn't give me a solution without taking it to an Apple Authorized Shop. The few stores here in Argentina wouldn't let me just send the computer to them, and traveling was out of the question due to my jobs. I lived with the crashes (that started getting more and more annoying) until my vacations (august 2016, just before the warranty ended) where I was able to travel and take it to an Apple Authorized Shop, where they supposedly ran all the tests and didn't find any problems with the machine, but did a clean install again just in case.

 

Two weeks later the crashes and restarts started again. Apple Support was no help, but they offered to extend the warranty until I was able to travel to Paraguay to take it to an Apple Service Provider (because even if I took it to and Apple Service Provider in Argentina, they can only do diagnostics because spare parts arrive within 4-6 months due to imports restrictions). Again, because of my job I needed the computer and couldn't travel. So I decided I would just sell it and buy a new one to end the hassle.

 

While I was prepairing it to send it to the new owner, I formatted the drive to do a clean install, but all of a sudden the main drive won't appear on disk utility! I cannot believe my luck.

 

I googled again and found some people having problems with the disk connector, and some others saying that the problem was the disk format.

 

I tried connecting it to an iMac via thunderbolt and it booted successfully from the iMac disk, but I still couldn't see the Macbook Pro's main drive on disk utility.

 

Now I'm not sure what to do, I am desperate, I have a wide knowledge of electronics so I'm not afraid of opening it up and see for myself if it is in fact the connector or something. If it is, then I can easily fix it, but if its not, then I'll have to take it to Paraguay (and I'm not sure when I'll be able to do so) for them to change the drive.

 

I don't know if this issue has anything to do with the previous problem, if I can ask for that warranty extension to have this fixed or what. I'm tired of contacting Apple Support and wasting time. This is my main work machine, and not having it is giving me a huge headache.

 

I'll be really happy if I can find a way to fix this myself without having to take it somewhere else.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Oct 13, 2016 7:07 AM

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