Clean erase & install of OS on internal SDD - Need help!

[mjones92]

Hello,

I have a 2013 macbook pro 15" retina (running Catalina) with an internal SSD which last year failed in some way/messed up, after it froze, I powered it off and then upon restarting couldnt boot onto/select the Mac OS drive. Its worth noting the hard drive was partitioned so it had windows on it also using bootcamp - which I now regret as I'm sure that was the cause of the failure.

I managed to recover some files off the HD using an OS installed on an external drive then using data recovery software.

Now its like a year later and I simply want to erase all the data on the internal SSD and have a fresh OS to work from. However I've had some issues:



- I cant reinstall the OS in recovery mode as the it only locates the bootcamp partition and the external OS drive and the bootcamp one is locked anyway. I imagine the Mac OS one isnt available because it isnt mounted and as below, I cant mount it.

- I cant erase the main SSD drive because when it starts processing it gets stuck on 'waiting for partitions to activate'

- The first aid doesnt work on the drive and shows an error message

- The greyed out mac OS volume wont mount which also means I cant manually delete the windows partition to see if that helps

(see attached images)



I had these results using disk utility within OS installed on the external HD and when using command + R recovery mode at start up to access disk utility that way.

I'm not super knowledgable on this stuff but have done some research and either the SDD is completely failed (which I dont think it is considering its still visible in disk utility etc) or something to do with the partition has messed up and thats whats preventing me from properly erasing and reformatting the drive.

I've also noticed when doing the diskutil list command in terminal there is loads of random disks (see the images attached).



Thought just wiping a drive would be simpler than this! But any help would be super helpful thank you.

 

[mjones92]

bump

 

[StoneJack]

Make usb catalina install. There are many apps that do it On pc or macs.
boot mac from usb, use installer’s disk utility to format disk and reinstall catalina

 

[mjones92]

Make usb catalina install. There are many apps that do it On pc or macs.
boot mac from usb, use installer’s disk utility to format disk and reinstall catalina

I have catalina installed on a memory stick as mentioned but I get the same errors when accessing the internal drive through disk utility on the memory stick OS. Or am I missing something and need to do it a different way? Thanks for the reply.

 

[StoneJack]

I have catalina installed on a memory stick as mentioned but I get the same errors when accessing the internal drive through disk utility on the memory stick OS. Or am I missing something and need to do it a different way? Thanks for the reply.

if disk utility cant do it then use terminal on installer and use that terminal command to fully erase disk. Once erased, use disk utilty to format for install. Terminal commands are much more powerful

 

[bradl]

I have catalina installed on a memory stick as mentioned but I get the same errors when accessing the internal drive through disk utility on the memory stick OS. Or am I missing something and need to do it a different way? Thanks for the reply.

He isn't talking about running Catalina on the USB stick. He's talking about creating a USB install disk for Catalina.

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

You can use a USB flash drive or other secondary volume as a startup disk from which to install the Mac operating system. These steps are primarily for system administrators and other experienced users who are familiar with entering commands in Terminal.

support.apple.com

If you are able to boot the Mac to Windows, or have a Windows machine somewhere other than that Mac, you can follow the instructions from here:

Make macOS USB installer on Windows 11 [Catalina & others]

Guide to creating a macOS USB disk on a Windows PC. In this tutorial, we will explain the process of making a bootable macOS installer using a DMG file on Windows. This method allows you to restore and recover a Mac offline.

www.winytips.com

Once you have the installer made, follow step #1 in the Intel Processor section of the support link from Apple, and you should be good to go for formatting the internal drive and installing Catalina.

BL.