Chosen Solution
Hello everyone, I had a drive failure on my Mac and learned it had been corrupted via disk utility. After attempting to fix this it now seems there is no startup volume. I tried restoring from my backup but disk utility could not restore from my backup and a pop up notice suggested the drive be erased first. It didn’t appear to work but after starting up again the drive appeared erased. However, there’s no startup volume shown. I can see the drive name but the partition option is grayed out. When I try the erase option again to rename the drive it keeps saying it failed. I’ve also tried a few terminal commands to no avail. Any idea as to how I can get through this? Thank you, I look forward to your replies.
Sounds like you have a OS mis-match issue here! Your system by default uses HFS+ file system you need to limit the OS to Sierra 10.12.x otherwise you can create OS & Firmware confusion! Yes, this system can support APFS when you upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra but I’ll warn you HS was an experiment! Apple updated the file system and OS with better versions of APFS but you system really can’t support the newer OS’s. So what I suspect here is this disk was setup from another system running a newer macOS release (APFS) which is messing you up. Your MacBook’s firmware was not upgraded with the need version so it won’t work properly.
If you have any files you want to save, copy them to another storage device. Open the Disk Utility app on your Mac using one of the following methods, depending on the type of disk or volume you want to erase: If you want to erase your startup disk: Start up your computer in macOS Recovery, then choose Disk Utility in the Recovery app. To learn how to start up your computer in macOS Recovery, see Intro to macOS Recovery. Note: If you want to get your Mac ready to trade in, sell or give away, and your computer is a Mac with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac with an Apple T2 Security Chip, use Erase Assistant. If you want to erase any other type of storage device: Double-click Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utility folder. Choose View > Show All Devices. In the sidebar, select the storage device you want to erase, then click the Erase button. Click the Scheme pop-up menu, then choose GUID Partition Map. If the Scheme pop-up menu isn’t available, make sure you selected the storage device you want to erase — it’s at the top of the hierarchy. Click the Format pop-up menu, then choose a file system format. Enter a name. (Optional) If available, click Security Options, use the slider to choose how many times to write over the erased data, then click OK. Secure erase options are available only for some types of storage devices. If the Security Options button is not available, Disk Utility cannot perform a secure erase on the storage device. Click Erase, then click Done. This May Help,Peter
