Chosen Solution
My 2014 MBP froze with a solid cursor, so I forced a reboot. I then was only getting to the load screen, with the progress indicator stuck to 100%. Again, forced a hard reboot. Then, I got nothing, with no picture on the screen, just a dim backlight. PRAM and SMC reset did nothing, and I wasn’t able to boot into any recovery or safe mode, nor use any bootable USB sticks, and I couldn’t toggle the caps lock key. I was hearing the chime, but got no apple logo or anything. Not even the flashing folder with question mark. After removing the SSD, I got the question marked folder, I could boot via USB stick, and could even do an internet recovery without any drives attached. Does a failed SSD present in this way? I figured I could at least boot the computer with a bad SSD, or, does this imply there is a short in the card? Implying it may be able to be repaired, or is it likely toast? I do have a backup, luckily, though, not current.
It sounds like your drive is bad, based on the behavior of the computer when you remove the drive. Once you remove it, you can boot with some sort of bootable media; but as long as it is installed, you can’t. If you have a similar computer, you could put its hard drive (or SSD) into this computer and try to boot with it. There may be some issues due to differences in the computers or in the setup of each computer; but the other hard drive should basically work in this computer if there is no issue with the computer itself. If the computer basically works with the other drive, then you can be sure that the drive in question is bad.
