Macbook Pro not booting, can't erase Macintosh HD

[Wilmer]

Hello!

A couple days ago my Macbook pro 13 inch (no touchbar) A1708 froze, in the midst of doing practically nothing. I let it sit for a minute or so and eventually force rebooted the device by the button. Upon startup it gave me the Apple logo and a gray progressbar, which filled up to 100% and stayed there, it never booted. A couple restarts later I started digging into it and have tried pretty much everything, first aid through Recovery mode and such does not work, the Mac just says it can’t unmount the drive.

It’s a 128 gb machine and I’ve got 13.94 gb to spare, meaning I can’t just press the reinstall osX because theres 4gb missing in space to run the installation.

I have tried making a bootable usb but once it finishes installing the same gray progressbar loads to 100% and stays there, even when making sure I boot from it.



As a final solution I’ve created images of my pictures and documents to back them up, the problem is that I can’t seem to erase the Macintosh HD disk/volume.

I’ve seen that there is a repair-program on these devices but mine doesn’t qualify.

I have ran Internet recovery and tried to unmount my ssd, but it wont let me, nor can i unmount it using commands in the terminal.
Both diskutil unmountDisk with and without force promts a "couldn't unmount volume".

My question is

What am I to do next?

Is there a way I can erase my Macintosh HD and start over with OSX, since I seem to need more space and booting from a usb didn’t work?

If I were to make a bootable usb, how do I make sure I boot recovery mode on the usb, so that the ssd is unmounted and I can erase my Macintosh HD?



Thanks alot

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum. Sorry about your troubles.

Are you sure you are booting into the recovery process? Your symptoms sound like you are not. You have to hold the key combination down until the boot sequence finishes, not just tap it at the start. The only reason for not being able to unmount the internal drive is that you are booted (or partially booted) from it.

Here is Apple's directions: About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

 

[Wilmer]

Yeah, with Internet recovery there's not much time between starting up and receiving the wifi screen, have all buttons pressed till I see the screen.

Running /sbin/fsck -fy in single user mode yields some interesting errors as follows..

*** Checking the container superblock.

*** Checking the EFI jumpstart record.

*** Checking the space manager.

*** Checking the space manager free queue trees.

error: sfqe_entry : (range 0x93eb140+0x4, xid 0x4835b6) : Range in free queue tree is not a vaid address range on disk

error: Spaceman free queue tree of type [1] is invalid

Space manager free queue trees are invalid.

*** The volume /dev/rdisk1s1 could not be verified completely.

Verbose mode doens't work at all, starts spamming an error starting with "spaceman_free.."

 

[MacInWin]

What version of macOS was on the Mac? Was the drive HFS+ or APFS? If I understand correctly, you can get to the recovery boot screen. Have you tried the Disk Utility repair function from there? It could be the SSD has failed, which is rare and unlikely, but it could also have a really messed up structural issues in the format/partitioning metadata. About the only way to fix that latter issue is to repartition and reformat the drive from scratch, losing everything on it. You should be able to do that from the Internet recovery screen with the option for Disk Utility.

 

[Wilmer]

Presumably it was on the latest 10.14.6, although I'm not sure, automatic updates was on. Mojave atleast.
The drive was in APFS.
The disk utility repair function wont work on the drive or it's physical disk, I get told it couldn't unmount the volume.
There's nothing on the drive I can't lose, I just need to nuke the whole thing, get it unmounted and erased, so that I can reformat it and get it working again.
There seems to be no way of doing so tho, I've tried the terminal way aswell using diskUtil unmountDisk force diskN but it just times out or tells me it couldn't unmount it. All in the internet recovery mode, since I understand that the normal cmd+R wont work nor let the drive unmount.
Anything left to do before taking the loss and going to the apple store?

 

[MacInWin]

All of that tells me you are still booting from the drive somehow. I would try an internet recovery. Here is the Apple article on recovery: How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery - Apple Support

From that article, you would use either Option-cmd-r or Shift-Opton-cmd-r to hold down during boot. You should get to the screen shown in the article, from where you can run Disk Utility and reformat the hardware drive, then create a partition on it and then install macOS. Because both of those boots are over the internet and not from the internal drive, the drive should never mount, and therefore never need unmounting.

 

[Wilmer]

That's the suspicious part, I know I'm booting to Internet recovery(unless I'm doing something wrong), since I'm getting the globe and wifi download part, I then reach Disk utility but the drive is still mounted?

 

[MacInWin]

Not to be super-critical, but you must be doing something wrong in the internet recovery. If you are, in fact, booted from the internet, the internal drive is not mounted, ever. You could even remove the internal drive and still boot from the Internet, in theory. Have you tried the shift-option-cmd-R boot combination? That combination brute forces an install of the version of OS that came with the machine. From there you can then upgrade to the latest Mojave.

And just to be clear, when you reformat, you are choosing the hardware in Disk Utility, right? The left-most, not indented, hardware named item on the top of the list in Disk Utility?

 

[Wilmer]

I've solved it, after a week of constant work on this I finally found a way.

I downloaded this modified version of Ubuntu which is optimized for these Macbooks, the normal Ubuntu wont work with trackpad and keyboard.
Ubuntu 18.04 image release for MacBook Pro 2017/6 with Touch Bar – FoolControl – Phear the penguin
Along with Rufus
Rufus
Made a bootable out of a usb, fat32 with 16kb, normal settings.
Launched the macbook into boot menu and chose the usb.
You'll be promted to choose between using a testversion of Ubuntu or installing it, I just ran the test.
In Ubuntu under applications there's one called "Disks", in there, believe it or not, you can see all the disks connected to the device.
I chose the ssd that was failing and deleted all of the volumes.
I restarted the Macbook, went through Internet Recovery and Disk Utility to erase or reformat the disk to a clean APFS.
Then it's just a matter of installing a new macOS copy.

Hope I'm not speaking too soon, not cancelling the Genius bar appointment yet atleast.

Thanks for all the help eitherway!

 

[MacInWin]

Hope that sorts it out for you. Let us know how it goes.

 

[ferrarr]

Good work, and thanks for posting the solution you used, as it may help someone else in the future. I do hope it will continue to work for you, and hope you have a backup solution in place going forward.

 

[MacInWin]

To follow up on what Bob said, I would recommend a cloned backup so that if the internal goes south again, you can boot from the backup and sort out the internal. Carbon Copy Cloner is what I use, although SuperDuper is good as well.

 

[Wilmer]

Posting this final comment from my macbook which has installed and booted perfectly fine.

Now how do I cancel that Genius guy

 

[MacInWin]

Well done! I think you can cancel at the Apple website.

 

[ferrarr]

You should be able to cancel it through the confirmation email as well.