Apple SSD Recovery Options
Posted: April 2nd, 2023, 14:58
Hey everyone,
I’m working on trying to recover a failing Apple SSD drive. This drive is the 12+16 pin, from ~2013-2015.
Symptoms/What I’ve tried:
- After attaching the drive to my iMac, it will disconnect on its own after a couple minutes.
- If I am quick, I can navigate the file system a couple of folders deep before Finder locks up, and the drive eventually disappears.
- If I try to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the disk once it has mounted, my iMac will lock up and crash.
- I can boot into Recovery Mode from the drive, but as soon as I try to access the file system via Terminal, it will lock up and disappear. I have run First Aid on the drive from Recovery Mode and it checks out fine. I’ve also mounted it on a Windows system and tested the drive with a couple of other utilities and I am not getting any sector errors or anything reporting back.
- If I mount it on my PC (using MacDrive), the data partition doesn’t every show up (only an “Update” partition). It will similarly disappear after a couple minutes.
- A coworker suggested I attempt to duplicate, disk-to-disk, so I purchased a Tableau TD2u duplicator and attempted this (using the USB interface while both source and target drives were in an enclosure), but it fails after 2 minutes or less when the source drive disappears. The error that comes back is simply “unexpected error occurred” or the like.
I’m at a loss as to what to do next. Any suggestions on how to find out what component on the drive is failing?
Thanks in advance!
I’m working on trying to recover a failing Apple SSD drive. This drive is the 12+16 pin, from ~2013-2015.
Symptoms/What I’ve tried:
- After attaching the drive to my iMac, it will disconnect on its own after a couple minutes.
- If I am quick, I can navigate the file system a couple of folders deep before Finder locks up, and the drive eventually disappears.
- If I try to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the disk once it has mounted, my iMac will lock up and crash.
- I can boot into Recovery Mode from the drive, but as soon as I try to access the file system via Terminal, it will lock up and disappear. I have run First Aid on the drive from Recovery Mode and it checks out fine. I’ve also mounted it on a Windows system and tested the drive with a couple of other utilities and I am not getting any sector errors or anything reporting back.
- If I mount it on my PC (using MacDrive), the data partition doesn’t every show up (only an “Update” partition). It will similarly disappear after a couple minutes.
- A coworker suggested I attempt to duplicate, disk-to-disk, so I purchased a Tableau TD2u duplicator and attempted this (using the USB interface while both source and target drives were in an enclosure), but it fails after 2 minutes or less when the source drive disappears. The error that comes back is simply “unexpected error occurred” or the like.
I’m at a loss as to what to do next. Any suggestions on how to find out what component on the drive is failing?
Thanks in advance!