Split Fusion Drive, now not booting, can't find solution!

[provhatr]

My 2011 Macbook Pro running El Capitan was running fine until recently when it suddenly decided to stop booting after getting a new charger which I assume was sketchy (refurbished apple from ebay). I believe that my fusion drive has split back into the original hdd and ssd and now I can't boot either of them. My findings and troubleshooting so far as a follows:

• When booting holding the option key, I can see two hard drives called "fusion" (what I originally called the combined drive). Both are visible to chose from but neither boot (reach full loading bar and stop)
• When booting into internal recovery, disk utility does not load, gets stuck on "loading disks" and trying to do a fresh install of el capitan doesn't work as the drives do not show up to install on to
• When booting into internet recovery, disk utility loads and shows the hard drives as two seperate disks with their own individual volumes, labelled as the original hard drive name "toshiba and sandisk"
• When I try to verify or repair the disks, i'm given the message "storage system verify or repair failed"
• When I try to restore (copy) the disks onto an external hard drive, i'm given the message "could not validate source error 254"

• I have an old backup of my hdd (el capitan) that is bootable, upon booting the internal hard drives were not detectable in finder and disk utility was stuck on "loading disks"
• I can't do a fresh install of Lion as the disks do not appear as options to install on to

I don't want to believe that my hard drive data is irrecoverable as both of them can still be detected in the option start up and the internet recovery mode. I can't find anything online regarding someone having all of these problems at once with no solution. Any help regarding this other than just wiping everything and re-fusing would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[CoastalOR]

If a fusion drive becomes unlinked then I'm pretty sure your data is lost unless you have a backup. The most likely culprits is a failure of the HDD or a the SATA cable connection.
https://www.macworld.com/article/3081971/how-to-fix-a-fusion-drive-that-has-come-unlinked.html

 

[maflynn]

I don't want to believe that my hard drive data is irrecoverable as both of them can still be detected in the option start up and the internet recovery mode

For all intents and purposes the data is gone. You can maybe try to contract out to one of those data recovery services, and they may be able to help but that will be extremely expensive.

 

[Fishrrman]

I agree with CoastalOR and maflynn above.

It looks like something has corrupted your hacked-together "fusion" drive, and the result is that all your data will now be unrecoverable.

That's the way it is with fusion drives.
When they're "together" and working, they're ok.
But... if something goes wrong and the fusion "falls apart" -- the data on them IS LOST.

I see "a way forward" for you, but you're not going to like it.
What I would do is this:

1. Connect and boot up from the old El Cap bootable drive.
2. ERASE both drives, and let them become "standalone" drives.
3. DO NOT attempt to "re-fuse" them. You see where that has brought you to.
4. Set one up to become "the main boot drive"
5. Restore your data from whatever backups you have
6. Go on with life from there.

But THE WORST POSSIBLE THING you can do would be to try to re-fuse the two internal drives...

 

[aznboi91]

@provhatr

I also have this issue, were you able to find a workaround?

I booted up from an external hardisk and saw this recovery tool was abe to scan and see the files from mojave and apfs. I haven't bought it yet and still looking for solutions to see if there are ways to retrieve the data without this type of tool.

https://www.stellarinfo.co.in/blog/how-to-recover-fusion-drive-data/

 

[allanmulwee]

Are you sure it's a macbook pro?