Cannot find internal hard drive after a failed upgrade to High Sierra

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Level 1

9 points

Cannot find internal hard drive after a failed upgrade to High Sierra

Hi there,

I tried to upgrade my Macbook Pro 15" Retina Mid 2014 to High Sierra from Sierra OS- I thought it downloaded fine, and then the machine restarted and tried to install, but it failed with "OSInstall.mpkg appears to be missing or damaged. Try again"

Now whenever I try to restart my machine, it is in an infinite loop of trying to install this "damaged" high sierra app and I can't even reset my machine to factory setting from recovery mode because it cannot find my internal hard drive in Disk Utility - only the High Sierra app is there! The internal hard drive has vanished

I tried rebooting it with my Time Machine, but without the location of the internal hard drive, it can't do anything. Is the hard drive broken? What else can I do? I've tried every single recovery solution 😟 It was working fine before I tried to upgrade to the new Mac OSX.

MacBook Pro with Retina display

Posted on Dec 15, 2017 11:27 AM

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Answer 1

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,179 points

Dec 16, 2017 4:43 AM in response to honeyskies

Try using the procedure here to start up using Internet Recovery:

About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

If you still can't see your drive, it's likely it failed during the installation process in some way; few things but more stress on a hard drive or SSD than a system upgrade as often thousands of files need to be modified and rewritten.

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Answer 2

Dec 30, 2017 5:41 AM in response to honeyskies

I needed to update citrix receiver to latest version on my iMac and it wasn't compatible with yosemite so thought I would upgrade to Hi Sierra. The upgrade failed and I had no way to recover from it. No repair options would work. I also thought I had a time capsule backup but couldn't find it so was totally stuck. Luckily had a 1.5tb external hard drive so I formatted that for mac os and then booted into repair mode and installed yosemite on the external drive. Once that was complete I managed to copy all my files onto the external version. This took a bit of work to keep all my application settings/favourites etc but once complete I could format the mac hard drive and reinstall Yosemite and copy back all my files. Lot of work but luckily I have some tech knowledge and had an external drive handy. Feel sorry for those who have neither. The only issue is I am now back on Yosemite and too scared to try the upgrade again.

I have lost a lot of confidence in apple products recently what with this and now my iPhone 5 playing up which I am putting down to their recent admissions. The phone was fine for what I needed and had had a replacement battery. After upgrading to the latest iOS the screen started to hang and become non reposnsive and now it's deteriorated even further. May well be nothing to do with their back door antics but I can't rule it out. Am seriously considering a different brand phone and going back to windows.

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