Can't boot into High Sierra (holding option)

[mmarino51589]

Hi all - I've been perusing the forums and kind of find some answers for my problem, but kind of not:

Current Hardware:
-Mid 2012 MacBook Pro running High Sierra (fairly certain I went to high sierra)
-240GB Intel SSD
-16GB RAM
-i7 2.3 (quad)
-Bootcamp w/ Windows 10 Home installed

About four weeks ago was the last time I booted into OSX. Restarted, and ever since, it defaulted to Windows - wasn't a big problem as I've had to use that more often as of late.

-Right click Bootcamp control panel, Restart in OSX, and it says OSX can't be found.
-Restart, hold Option, only Windows partition is found
-Attempt PRAM & SMC reset (because why not), nothing
-Attempt single user mode & safe mode, only boots to Windows
-Launch Internet recovery (cmd + r)
-Launched disk utility
-See disk0s2 (fairly certain it was 2) (grayed out, can't do any first aid to it, can't mount it)
-Launch terminal
-Issue "diskutil list"

Output in picture.

I see it's still reporting as HFS and not APFS (though I thought High Sierra converted SSD's to APFS).

Any ideas from the members? You guys are all really smart and I generally find most of my answers here, but this one has my stymied big time.

Thanks for your time!

 

[casperes1996]

Could you try "diskutil cs list" and "diskutil apfs list" too, I'd like some more details.

Do you have any important data on your macOS partition that is not backed up?

 

[mmarino51589]

Here's a photo of the results (PS: thanks for your reply)

As far as the data - yes, I'd be a tad on the "screwed" side if I lost it. I don't have a recent backup - and the most recent one I have doesn't contain a lot of what I need

More importantly, why TF would this happen randomly like this?

Thanks again

 

[casperes1996]

Here's a photo of the results (PS: thanks for your reply)

As far as the data - yes, I'd be a tad on the "screwed" side if I lost it. I don't have a recent backup - and the most recent one I have doesn't contain a lot of what I need

More importantly, why TF would this happen randomly like this?

Thanks againView attachment 758671

Fascinating - Do you have access to a different Mac, via a friend or something? I'd like for you to try and create a USB installer for macOS High Sierra, and use the Terminal in that, instead of this. - Since this is an older version (from internet recovery) it doesn't have the apfs commands for apfs disks.

If you don't have that, maybe you have a different hard drive or something, that you could install the Internet Recovery OS onto, and make the USB installer via that.

Either your macOS partition is APFS and thus unrecognised by this version of the Recovery system, or it's somehow quite corrupted. How is so far a mystery to me.

 

[mmarino51589]

Fascinating - Do you have access to a different Mac, via a friend or something? I'd like for you to try and create a USB installer for macOS High Sierra, and use the Terminal in that, instead of this. - Since this is an older version (from internet recovery) it doesn't have the apfs commands for apfs disks.

If you don't have that, maybe you have a different hard drive or something, that you could install the Internet Recovery OS onto, and make the USB installer via that.

Either your macOS partition is APFS and thus unrecognised by this version of the Recovery system, or it's somehow quite corrupted. How is so far a mystery to me.

When I get home from work I'll get my wife's macbook air and get a bootable copy of High Sierra and post back results

Thanks again for your help so far

 

[casperes1996]

When I get home from work I'll get my wife's macbook air and get a bootable copy of High Sierra and post back results

Thanks again for your help so far

You're welcome, matey
Hope it shows something - so far I'm a bit perplexed I must admit.... Actually, another idea sprung to mind too. If all else fails (and only then), we could try and see if it's just the partitioning table that's a bit confused, and perhaps we could restore it with GDISK by re-informing GUID of the format type, and that it's bootable

 

[mmarino51589]

Update:

Booted into cmd+opt+r to download newest internet recovery tools (stupid me, didn't even think of that). Have verified it IS APFS - see pictures:

 

[casperes1996]

Update:

Booted into cmd+opt+r to download newest internet recovery tools (stupid me, didn't even think of that). Have verified it IS APFS - see pictures:

View attachment 758678 View attachment 758679 View attachment 758680 View attachment 758681

Right.... That last image there shows quite an eye-catching issue....

The way APFS works, it's got both an APFS partition and inside that partition, containers for the actual storage - consider them virtual partitions, allowing you to quickly and easily change the size of APFS Volumes and even have them dynamically change size.
On your drive, the APFS physical partition is present, but for some reason, the APFS container has vanished.


The command "diskutil apfs createContainer" will give you a new container, however, it won't give you back your data. As of now, there's to my knowledge no data recovery software that supports APFS, so outside of seeing if Apple support has any ideas for that, I think you might have to deal with data loss :/

 

[treekram]

I would agree with the previous post that at this point, you should probably get in touch with Apple support.

I am curious, though - does your Windows work OK? Can you actually save files to the disk in Windows?

The reason why I ask is that your disk0s2 shows "Writeable" as being "no". Now, previous to High Sierra and APFS, I would have thought that this meant that the SSD went into read-only mode (note that if you try this on the disk instead of an individual volume/partition, will have writeable as no). It may be that now with APFS, the volume/partition will have writeable as no as default as it's the containers are the ones to look as being writeable.

 

[casperes1996]

I would agree with the previous post that at this point, you should probably get in touch with Apple support.

I am curious, though - does your Windows work OK? Can you actually save files to the disk in Windows?

The reason why I ask is that your disk0s2 shows "Writeable" as being "no". Now, previous to High Sierra and APFS, I would have thought that this meant that the SSD went into read-only mode (note that if you try this on the disk instead of an individual volume/partition, will have writeable as no). It may be that now with APFS, the volume/partition will have writeable as no as default as it's the containers are the ones to look as being writeable.

Well we can quickly find that out - Hold on as I go to my laptop (on iMac with Fusion Drive now)...




The writeable thing is not the issue. Only Volumes show as writeable, not physical APFS parts - Hell, not even the container layer - only the volume layer. I assume that if the system wishes to change something about the container, it makes a temporary change to the writability.

 

[mmarino51589]

I would agree with the previous post that at this point, you should probably get in touch with Apple support.

I am curious, though - does your Windows work OK? Can you actually save files to the disk in Windows?

The reason why I ask is that your disk0s2 shows "Writeable" as being "no". Now, previous to High Sierra and APFS, I would have thought that this meant that the SSD went into read-only mode (note that if you try this on the disk instead of an individual volume/partition, will have writeable as no). It may be that now with APFS, the volume/partition will have writeable as no as default as it's the containers are the ones to look as being writeable.

So, Windows works just fine...I can't see nor access the Apple partition (never was able to - even when the OSX partition was working correctly) - and from what I gathered, it was due to Bootcamp drivers not supporting the RWX capability of an HFS volume.

I appreciate the insight, though...good catch on that.
[doublepost=1524018796][/doublepost]Gents, I've found this thread:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...f-ffff-ffffffffffff-and-fusion-drive-unlinked

In your (much more) professional opinion, do you think that this is a rabbit hole I should consider venturing down? I'm fairly tech savy, but this definitely seems a bit complicated and involved.

However, I understand the risks associated with it and potentially screwing stuff up.

I do, however, enjoy myself a good tech challenge - but I'd like to get your opinions on how feasible this could be (and whether or not this really is even in the same category of problem that I'm having)

Thanks guys!

 

[casperes1996]

So, Windows works just fine...I can't see nor access the Apple partition (never was able to - even when the OSX partition was working correctly) - and from what I gathered, it was due to Bootcamp drivers not supporting the RWX capability of an HFS volume.

Read-only drivers are available for HFS for Windows, but not bundled by Apple. There may even be write drivers nowadays.

 

[treekram]

Well we can quickly find that out - Hold on as I go to my laptop (on iMac with Fusion Drive now)...

The writeable thing is not the issue. Only Volumes show as writeable, not physical APFS parts - Hell, not even the container layer - only the volume layer. I assume that if the system wishes to change something about the container, it makes a temporary change to the writability.

Thanks for taking the trouble for looking into this. This was the second thread where I saw this and in the other thread where APFS went amok I mentioned that it might be a new APFS thing where writeable is no on a partition. So it's good that you confirmed my hunch.

So, Windows works just fine...I can't see nor access the Apple partition (never was able to - even when the OSX partition was working correctly) - and from what I gathered, it was due to Bootcamp drivers not supporting the RWX capability of an HFS volume.

I appreciate the insight, though...good catch on that.
[doublepost=1524018796][/doublepost]Gents, I've found this thread:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...f-ffff-ffffffffffff-and-fusion-drive-unlinked

In your (much more) professional opinion, do you think that this is a rabbit hole I should consider venturing down? I'm fairly tech savy, but this definitely seems a bit complicated and involved.

However, I understand the risks associated with it and potentially screwing stuff up.

I do, however, enjoy myself a good tech challenge - but I'd like to get your opinions on how feasible this could be (and whether or not this really is even in the same category of problem that I'm having)

Thanks guys!

Thanks for confirming that your Windows is writeable - so it looks more like a APFS problem than a SSD hardware problem.

In looking at the link you posted, I don't think that will help. It looks like it was done before APFS and it doesn't look like the goal of what they were trying to do matches yours (recover your partition).