High Sierra Killed My Hard Drive?

You can install on an external drive. I would made a usb installer for the OS you want to install. Of course you would have to have access to a Mac in order to download and create the USB installer.

How to Create a Bootable macOS Sierra Installer

How to make a bootable OS X 10.11 El Capitan installer drive | Macworld

I have this same issue. Installed High Sierra on my wife's late 2013 A1398. After installation, it asked to encrypt the hard drive, asked her for her Apple ID, etc. Rebooted and crashed. Will not boot Backlight functions, but no sound, no Recovery option, nothing. Sent it to a repair center, was told they are getting a LOT of these. Replaced the hard drive, immediately booted back up. The hard drive is unrecoverable. Completely destroyed the file map. Won't even recognize in a USB external hard drive caddy when plugged in. Apple has cost me $350 and hours of data recovery. Anyone have a line on legal recourse with Apple? Pretty sure their disclaimer of use does not cover this many people having their hardware destroyed.

Did you use shift option command R to boot into recovery? I would try this option then upgrade after it installs the original OS X.

If you have not erased the hard drive try target disk mode the hard drive to another machine to retrieve your data

I would not format as APFS at this time. Doubtful you'll get much benefit from the conversion. Wait a bit for APFS to mature then you can upgrade at a later time.

You might even consider sticking with Sierra and let High Sierra mature a bit before upgrading.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

How to install macOS - Apple Support

Same thing happened to me on my 27" iMac. It asked me to restart because of that disk error three times.

It never installed.

I had go to the recovery partition and restore from backup. This, of course, means I need to redo two step login and all other logins, not to mention repair photos library and such.

What a pain.

I'm gunshy about installing it on my other macs, 13" MacBook pro, 21" iMac.

dianeoforegon wrote:

Is your HDD formatted as anything other than APFS?

DO NOT format a rotational HDD drive as APFS! Only format SSD drives as APFS.

I've done it before. Both a boot drive running High Sierra and an external drive with a bootable clone. I heard it wasn't recommended due to possible performance hits, but it did seem to work. It may have been slower, but I was seeing so much beach balling with an HFS+ formatted drive that I wouldn't have been able to notice.

I've since changed to an SSD and reformatted my hard drives in HFS+.

Contact apple, they will arrange for reinstalling of your os at your local apple dealer. They may charge a token fee. This is endemic problem with an updage released too soon before debugging it. At the same time it also trashed my backup my passport drive.

Because the closest Apple store is an hour away in the most crowded part of the city that exists. Nashville is awful now with all the new people moving here and no extra roads expanded to accommodate them.

So I sent it off to a repair center, knowing that Apple has a habit of replacing mainboards for $700 a pop rather than really diagnosing problems. Yes, I have all the email correspondence and the receipt, they just shipped it back to me yesterday and emailed the receipt with documentation and the original drive.

Yes they tried the thumb drive boot. They tried putting my hard drive in another laptop to isolate failure, and confirmed it's the drive. They attempted accessing the hard drive to transfer and/or back up my data through an external USB drive adapter connected to a desktop Mac and it will not read nor even recognize that a hard drive is connected.

The drive is bricked and unusable. It is the only component that is faulty.

Lear70 wrote:

The drive is bricked and unusable. It is the only component that is faulty.

FWIW, It's possible the drive failed. They can fail at any time and yours is going on 5 years old. But, High Sierra had nothing to do with it failing.

Hi James,

Which hard disk or partition was selected when you noticed the Erase button was greyed out? The Erase button will be greyed out if OS X Base System is selected because that's the Recovery environment itself. Is the Erase button still greyed out when APPLE SSD is selected?

If that's the case, then try using Terminal to do the job. Disconnect all external drives, then open Terminal, and type this command:

diskutil list

This should list all of the hard drives and partitions currently connected to your Mac. Can you please upload a screenshot of what Terminal shows?

Your last image was confusing. It is nothing like your previous diskutil list printout. It's showing actual folders that are in var (invisible) plus other System and Library folders.

I didn't use sudo since it couldn't find it and I read in any case that when you boot up in recovery mode you get a root shell so no need for sudo.

When the steps include sudo you should use the commands as given.

I suggest you do the unmount disk2-disk12 first then try the steps to unmount disk0 followed by the other commands.

I agree, the more you try to fix, it seems to make the problem worse. You just got to get all unmounted so you can do the erase.

I have a lab with a number of Mac Pro 5,1 from 2010 and 2012, all upgraded -- 2x3.33 or 3.46 Ghz CPUs, max RAM in some cases, internal and external SSD and rotating drives of various types and capacities (2-8TB), upgraded GPUs, USB 3, etc. In the most-used Mac Pro, I can confirm that since upgrading to High Sierra, I have had round-robin drive failures -- it seems that something, and I have not yet been able to identify any specific cause, is causing internal and external rotating drives to experience corruption. One or more drives fail, cannot be repaired, but can still be mounted and accessed read-only, so data can be copied to another drive, the failed drive reformatted, and the data copied back. Then within a few days, the process repeats. This has cost many hours of work, but thanks to good backup routines, nothing so far has been lost. The real pain (and stress) is when the external drives holding Time Machine backups fail, and that has happened several times now.

Interestingly, the boot drive on the most-used machine is an SSD that was auto-converted to APFS when HS was installed -- that drive appears to be working fine, but Disk Utility will not repair it. Other internal SSDs (not using APFS) located on a PCI card seem to be more stable, though one Bootcamp partition on an internal SSD did get corrupted and had to be reformatted.

It is beyond statistically improbable that all of these drives are suddenly failing at the same time. There are numerous possibilities, but I have eliminated a number of them so far, and the most likely culprit remaining is High Sierra. Interestingly, rotating drives reformatted as APFS instead of HFS+ seem so far to be more stable. I am seriously considering reverting to Sierra for my Mac Pros. I'll post again if I have more data to add.

I had similar issues with Disk Utility in High Sierra. I was able to erase and repair external drives using Disk Utility in an older version of macOS. If you can attach those drive to either El Capitan or Sierra you can erase the drive. Then do nothing to the drive using High Sierra Disk Utility.

While it was never obvious in Disk Utility, I found if I booted into Recovery Drive and ran diskutil list in Terminal, it found multiple partitions made each time I tried to run First Aid to repair the drives. One drive had 29 extra partitions. I had to manually unmount all these extra partitions then I could erase the drive as one partition. After I did this I used Disk Utility in El Capitan to partition the drive.

I highly suggest you send your experiences to Apple:

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