Not the typical boot to flashing question mark.

[UrsaMinor]

Macbook Air mid 2013 with an i5 and a 128GB Samsung SSD.

Symptom:

Boots to a flashing question mark.

Diagnostics:

1) Reset the PRAM. Also disconnected the battery and held down the power button.

2) Booted to Recovery Mode. Disk utility shows the SSD with the correct free and used space. First aid shows no problem with the SSD.

3) In recovery mode, the start up disk option shows no drive at all. It claims it can't get enough info from the drive.

4) Booted to an El Cap and Sierra USB, and tried steps 2 and 3. The same thing happened.

5) Tried to re-install the operating system with a USB stick, but the installer doesn't show the SSD.

What the heck is going on here? Why does disk utility show the SSD, but the rest of the mac doesn't? The only possible clue I have is the SSD is APFS. Could that have something to do with it?

 

[saulinpa]

Sometimes gets corrupt that disk util can't fix. Delete the container/erase the disk.

 

[UrsaMinor]

Thanks for the reply.

It seems my only option left to try, is to delete and recreate the partition, then format it.

 

[MBAir2010]

i might have ruined a ssd (60gb) on the macbook air today by trying to go to from el capitan to snow leopard using original USB. after an hour or rebooting, trying to erase, rebooting cmd r option, i got that flashing ? folder.

what i should have done was reboot time machine were mt lion sits, then reboot to snow leopard.
\then someone suggested: "Try erasing the disk using Disk Utility from the Snow Leopard installer. Install rEFIt or something similar to boot into USB"
maybe this can help you

 

[UrsaMinor]

I ended up partitioning the drive with HFS+. I then installed High Sierra and it's all good now.