High Sierra Killed My Hard Drive?

yes I am puzzled as to why it shows the connection type as external for disk0, and additionally, it only appears temporarily then eventually disappears altogether??

This could be the last gasping attempts of the drive to try mounting itself.

"Forced unmount of disk0 failed: at least one volume could not be unmounted"

I wonder if all those additional partitions are what also need to be unmounted. Let's try unmounting those individually.

diskutil unmountDisk force disk2

You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful” if all goes well. Then repeat for the remaining disk3-disk12

If you were successful in unmounting disk2- disk12, let's do the additional steps in the Terminal.

• Best to copy/paste.
• Do not get any trailing spaces at the end.
• It's a zero not the letter O.

Open the Terminal and copy/paste in:

diskutil unmountDisk force disk0

<Return>

You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk0 was successful” if all goes well.

Now you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command. It will prompt you for your password (note you do not see the password when you type it in).

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024

<Return>

You should get a result that looks like this

“1024+0 records in

1024+0 records out

1048576 bytes transferred in 0.673985 secs (1555785 bytes/sec)”

Now you need to partition the disk as Mac OS Extended Journaled. You can change the name in the quote marks to Macintosh HD or wait and rename it later:

diskutil partitionDisk disk3 GPT JHFS+ "UNTITLED" 0g

Perhaps the the high cost quoted to replace my drive is because it it soldered onto the main board and so can't be replaced in isolation? I'll double check.

I don't believe the MBP drive was soldered on the older MBPs. The MacBookAir were soldered. The videos should show what is required using the Model ID and Identifier.

Forgot to mention, if you do get the drive to erase and you install the original version of OS X, you can choose to upgrade to Sierra instead of High Sierra.

Download OS X 10.12 Sierra https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

Diane, that may be the most helpful thing I've read on this forum so far.

I didn't know the option to upgrade to original Sierra was present. I'll be linking that to all my friends and family as I now know of 3 failed hard drives in my immediate circle after attempting to upgrade to High Sierra on 2012-2013 MBP's, two of which are now unrecoverable.

It appears the more you work to force the drive to recover, the worse the drive is corrupted. The guy who had the only luck recovering his data stopped immediately and simply took it for repair, they replaced the hard drive, and were able to read the old drive to recover his data. The other two of us, having done quite a bit of laptop repair, tried fixing it ourselves with all these help groups, and actually made the drive worse.

Funny how people much more experienced than I am (I'm an old DOS and Windows expert, went to Mac about 5 years ago but didn't take the time to learn Mac like I knew DOS/Windows systems) are saying "I don't know why it's doing that".

Clearly there's a problem with the OS on a specific chipset of Macs. At least now I have a way to get to a slightly newer OS without trashing my drives again. We have 3 2012-2013 MBP's in the house. I won't be upgrading the OS again for a long, long, long time.

I may have made some progress on this total nightmare. This probably won't help everyone, but it's a new approach that I haven't seen written up anywhere else and it seems to have solved my problem so far.

My symptoms - total nightmare for the past two weeks, began maybe 2-3 weeks after upgrading to High Sierra:

1. Repeated spinning wheels of death, slowdowns, freezes which all appear to be related to difficulty accessing a hard drive. It appeared that several of my disks were damaged, as it seemed like my system was stalled as if the drive was repeatedly trying to access a bad sector. In reality, one or two of my disks appears to be truly damaged but others ended up OK.
2. The random "ejects" of external hard drives that others have reported, accompanied by error messages about the drive not being properly ejected. Interestingly, this would often occur simultaneously for two drives that were mounted in the same multi-bay enclosure. More on this in a moment.
3. Time Machine started having problems with disk errors, spinning wheels, etc.

I tried all kinds of things -- bought two new drives, bought a new 4-bay enclosure, new cables, and nothing solved the problem. As others have noted, it seemed like disks kept failing, even new ones. At some point, I realized that every failure was on a drive that was mounted in a 2-bay or 4-bay enclosure (non-RAID, in my case; just independent disks mounted in the same enclosure). And I then went back and read this and other threads and noticed that many people who were having problems were also using enclosures.

THEORY #1: I thus came up with the theory that High Sierra has a bug that possibly appears only when two drives are mounted in the same enclosure. And, from my observations, it crapped out when both drives were being accessed at about the same time (in other words, it ran for hours just fine if only one drive was being used, but as soon as the other one came into use, the problems began).

To test, I had two drives (6TB and 2TB) mounted in the same 4-bay enclosure (2 bays were empty) that was consistently failing with eject errors. I moved one drive to a separate 2-bay enclosure, plugged into a separate USB port on the back of my iMac 5K, and kept the other drive as the sole drive within a 4-bay enclosure. Since making that change, I have gotten much much farther without errors, doing the same things I was doing previously that resulted in an "eject" or other failure. So, for the moment, having no more than one drive mounted in any multi-bay enclosure appears to have solved my problem.

I did find another post related to enclosures.

THEORY #2: I'm not sure about this one, but I came up with it a while back so I'm going to mention it here. I initially thought Time Machine was the problem, but at this point I'm not sure whether there is a separate TM bug OR if TM is crapping out because of the problem described above. However, I noticed in many postings that report TM errors under HS, people were using an encrypted TM drive (as was I when it started failing). I'm also guessing that the TM preference file gets clobbered once you start having problems with. So, when I get brave enough to try TM again, I'm going to do a full TM reset (trashing preferences) and use an unencrypted drive. In all that I've read about TM problems under HS, I haven't seen anyone try an unencrypted drive along with a TM reset.

I'll be interested in hearing if this is helpful to anyone.

Same here!! My macbook pro was working perfectly before trying to install HS. Now all i get is black screens. I’ve lost clients and payments of $500 because of this! I am really not happy!