2015 MBP will only boot to internet recovery

[QCassidy352]

13" 2015 MacBook Pro. Worked fine until today. Pressing the power button does cause the screen to come on and the Apple logo to light up, but nothing boots.

Holding down Option as it starts up can get me to the internet recovery disk. Once in internet recovery mode, Startup Disk does not see any bootable drives, Disk Utility does not see any drives other than the internet recovery drive, and Install OS X cannot find any location to install to.

Safe to say that the SSD up and died? Anything else that could be going on?

thank you!

 

[Anarchy99]

sounds like SSD to me, luckily its a socketed part so you can either find a used Apple one, go 3rd party like OWC or my personal fav get a M.2 NVME ssd and the appropriate adaptor.

you can take it to a apple store and they would do a free diagnostic to be sure, or you could buy the parts and try it and return the parts if thats not it (re-stocking fee may apply depending on where and what you buy)

 

[QCassidy352]

sounds like SSD to me, luckily its a socketed part so you can either find a used Apple one, go 3rd party like OWC or my personal fav get a M.2 NVME ssd and the appropriate adaptor.

you can take it to a apple store and they would do a free diagnostic to be sure, or you could buy the parts and try it and return the parts if thats not it (re-stocking fee may apply depending on where and what you buy)

Thanks for the reply. I have an apple store quite near by, so that would probably be the easier way to verify.

 

[pshufd]

You could try to see if an external drive works too.

 

[QCassidy352]

You could try to see if an external drive works too.

You mean try booting it off an external drive?

 

[Anarchy99]

You could try to see if an external drive works too.

You mean try booting it off an external drive?

that won't do anything other than confirming your USB ports are working.

all booting off a external drive would do is confirm what you already know, the majority of the computer works while the SSD remains undetected.

booting off a external USB HD would only be useful to confirm if your other hardware was working if say internet recovery couldn't load, because that could indicate other issues such as bad ram etc.

 

[Fishrrman]

Some random thoughts:

As mentioned, internal SSD may have failed. It happens now and then.
If there's a brick-n-mortar Apple Store within reasonable distance, I'd make an appt. at the genius bar and let them have a look at it first. Shouldn't cost anything to just have them "look".

Do you have a backup?

You CAN boot and run the computer from an external drive (preferably another SSD). You would first have to use internet recovery to put a copy of the OS on it, set up a user account, etc.

If you had kept a bootable cloned backup drive (using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper), the MBP would be up-and-running RIGHT NOW. That's why they're BETTER THAN a Time Machine backup.

As mentioned above, the SSD Apple used in these is of "proprietary design".
Apple could install another, might be pricey.
You could go to ebay and perhaps find a used Apple-original drive and install it yourself, might be somewhat cheaper.

 

[QCassidy352]

Thanks. This MBP is itself a backup, so yes, all data is preserved, and work continues on a 2017 model.

Sounds like a trip to the Apple store for diagnostics is in order.