2011 MCB fusion drive setup dead

[snowspeeder]

So I have been successfully running a DIY fusion drive for a few months when the sad suddenly died. I knew this because when I booted the apple screen would turn into a cancel sign.

So I booted from a recovery USB, and used terminal to undo the fusion setup with diskutil ca delete <fusion drive number>.

I then removed both hard drives, reinstalled my SuperDrive and left only my 500gb hdd.

I attempted to boot back into USB and use disk utility to format the hd to hfs. Every time I try, it fails to unmoving the drive and will not let me proceed.

I then think, ok both drives are dead. So I try 3 other know working drives. All of those drives aren't even seen in disk utility, only the one that was once part of the fusion drive.

I then put that drive in a windows computer, set GUID partition table and format to NTFS and am able to read/write to the drive.

I put it back into my MacBook to reformat and it does the same thing. Any advice?

 

[newdeal]

So I have been successfully running a DIY fusion drive for a few months when the sad suddenly died. I knew this because when I booted the apple screen would turn into a cancel sign.

So I booted from a recovery USB, and used terminal to undo the fusion setup with diskutil ca delete <fusion drive number>.

I then removed both hard drives, reinstalled my SuperDrive and left only my 500gb hdd.

I attempted to boot back into USB and use disk utility to format the hd to hfs. Every time I try, it fails to unmoving the drive and will not let me proceed.

I then think, ok both drives are dead. So I try 3 other know working drives. All of those drives aren't even seen in disk utility, only the one that was once part of the fusion drive.

I then put that drive in a windows computer, set GUID partition table and format to NTFS and am able to read/write to the drive.

I put it back into my MacBook to reformat and it does the same thing. Any advice?

Are you sure you are booting recovery on the usb and not the recovery partition on the hard drive? Failure to unmount often is because the drive you are trying to unmount is the one you are running off of. Perhaps try just erasing the partition by clicking the individual partition in disk util and going to erase, by doing this you can erase the drive without unmounting it

 

[snowspeeder]

im sure im booting from USB. Additionally, the drive has been formatted on a windows machine. So the recovery partiton doesn't exists.

Keep in mind, the only hard drives the macbook will show in Disk Utility it the ones originally part of the Fusion setup.

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Also attempting to remove the partiton, just sits on "Preparing to remove partition" for about 5 minutes before it errors out.