Mid-2015 MBP booting with Folder and ?

[Gadget-Man]

My 2015 MacBook Pro is booting with a Folder with a ? in it.

I tried going into the recovery mode and reformatting the drive and it comes up with errors when trying erase the drive and it won’t fix the errors.

Any ideas?


Thanks.

 

[DeltaMac]

My 2015 MacBook Pro is booting with a Folder with a ? in it.

I tried going into the recovery mode and reformatting the drive and it comes up with errors when trying erase the drive and it won’t fix the errors.

Any ideas?

Two things to try. Make sure that you boot to internet recovery, and not just Recovery mode.
There will be a difference in the appearance, as internet recovery will show you a spinning globe during boot, and not the normal Apple icon. The difference is that recovery mode uses a hidden partition on your boot drive, and Internet Recovery boots to Apple's server. Try the Internet recovery, then Disk Utility. If that continues to give errors when you try erasing, then it is likely that the SSD has failed.
The OTHER way to try this is to boot to a system on another drive, such as a macOS installer on a bootable USB external (or flash) drive. Again, Disk Utility from the utilities window, and try to erase the drive again.
Still get errors? Time to replace the SSD (or might work to install the macOS system to an external drive, and just use that to boot from. Not so portable then, but maybe you are OK with that )

 

[Fishrrman]

As Delta said, if you're trying to ERASE the internal drive, you need to do it from INTERNET RECOVERY, and NOT from regular "recovery mode".

That means booting from "command-OPTION-R".

You'll need to enter your wifi password.

 

[Gadget-Man]

Got this image after trying to erase after going into internet recovery mode.

Selected Macintosh HD and APFS and got this image.

 

[DeltaMac]

Try again.
shut power off, then restart holding Option-Command-p and r
That will do an NVRAM reset, keep holding the same four keys, until you hear the boot chime two times, then release the keys. No reason to let it start up, so hold the power button until it shuts off again.
Press and release the power button. Hold Option-Command-r (booting into internet recovery mode again)
If you have a 2015 MBPro, you should boot into a 10.10 (Yosemite) system. Check that by going into Reinstall OS X. That will open the installer, which will tell you on first screen what version of OS X would be installed at that time.
Quit the installer to return to the main menu screen. Open Disk Utility.
Yosemite would NOT be able to see an APFS volume, so if you see your Macintosh HD, and it shows as an APFS volume, then I will assume you are on a system newer than Yosemite. You SHOULD see, in Disk Utility, the top left corner allows you to view all devices. Make sure to choose that selection. Now, directly above Macintosh HD, should be the manufacturer's info for the SSD (part number and capacity, for example). Choose THAT line, then select Erase. Name the drive, if you like. Erase should work this time...

 

[Gadget-Man]

Still didn’t work.

Trying external drive to see if I can install macOS on there and then run macOS and format main ssd in MacBook Pro. Model A1398

Are there any cheap solutions to replacing the ssd.

 

[Nbd1790]

The folder and question mark usually indicate a bad hard drive 9/10. It's basically the systems way of saying that it can't locate the operating system (usually because it can't read the hard drive) Replacing the SSD will usually fix this problem, unless the problem lies within the Logic Board itself (in which case it will be an expensive repair)

The most cost effective option would be to replace the SSD yourself and purchase a hard drive through Other World Computing https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-pro

Price will vary based on your SSD size preference. Just make sure you select the correct drive for your model year.

 

[Gadget-Man]

I already looked there. Was hoping for something cheaper.


And with running an external drive it still won’t let me format it saying it’s in use. I can see the drive so I don’t think it’s the controller.

 

[Nbd1790]

Unfortunately these types of SSD's are much more expensive than your traditional SATA SSD drives. You can always see if people are selling used ones on eBay (although I probably wouldn't recommend it) OWC will most likely be a few hundred dollars cheaper than having it replaced through Apple, who won't allow you to choose an upgraded storage option and will only replace the drive with the same capacity storage that the laptop shipped with.