Only "MacOS Base System" appearing in Disk Utility

[BenMc47]

Hello. Recently, my MacBook from 2012, after a while of struggling, stopped booting up. I tried opening it in Target Disk Mode, but it didn't work. I booted it up in Recovery Mode, but the Disk Utility only shows the Mac OS Base System.

Under these circumstances, with the main hard drive not showing up at all, is there anything I could try to do on my own to either restore the computer all together, or to get data off of the main hard drive, without taking the machine physically into a data recovery specialist? I'm not hopeful about it but I thought I'd ask before I give up.

Thanks for any assistance.

 

[Amethyst1]

Can you hear the hard drive making strange sounds, such as clicking or repeatedly starting up? If so, that indicates physical damage (e.g. head crash) and the best way to attempt data recovery would indeed be to have a specialist lab handle it. You can’t just open a hard drive at home, that will certainly destroy it.

If it doesn’t make strange sounds, it’s possible that…

• The drive is dead, in which case the best chance of recovery is, again, to have a professional do it.
• The drive still works and the fault is within the Mac (e.g. faulty SATA cable). In this case, you could get a USB to SATA adapter, remove the hard drive from the Mac and attach it to another machine using the adapter to try to recover the data.

As for how to restore the Mac to working order, if the hard drive is faulty you’ll have to replace it. In that case, you might consider an SSD as they’re much faster which will result in noticeably faster boot and application launch times.