Urgent help needed!:(:(

Hey guys,

I have just got my MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) back from my younger brother. He has somehow deleted all detection of the hard drive when attempting to 'restore to factory settings' before returning to me.
I am currently using High Sierra, running off a 1TB external hd.

As you can see there is absolutely no sign of the internal drive. He insists that he deleted something using 'Disk Utility' in recovery mode- so isn't a hardware fault.


Please help!!!

Welcome to our forums.

It appears your brother may have wiped or deleted your Macintosh HD so that now you have a blank drive. (the drive is still there and usable) You will need to reinstall macOS. Boot to Recovery (Command plus r) and enter Utilities, Disk Utility. Then if possible take a screen shot of your hard drive and post it here so we can see exactly what he did. Do not boot the machine with your USB attached drive or will not be able to see what's going on. The screen shot you provided only tells us that you're booted from the USB drive.

However, you may wind up having to reinstall macOS using Internet Recovery. Also, tell us what version of macOS your MacBook Pro was running before this happened.

Absolutely, here are the supporting images.

I was running High Sierra 10.13.
I reinstalled High Sierra 10.13 to my external hard drive using the Recovery Boot Menu.

Now keep Junior well away!

Well, that’s if there’s a fix?

Your pictures are very fuzzy and pretty much unreadable, but if I understand, you are booted from an external drive, but cannot mount your internal drive at all? If so, about the only thing I can think to do is to boot from the recovery partition again and run DU from there to see if you can reformat the internal drive and reinstall the OS. That will erase anything on the original drive, so unless you have a backup, it's all gone. But as it is, it's gone now anyway, so maybe that's ok?

I launched DU from the recovery partition. The only drive that is displayed is an OS X Base System.

I cannot reformat the drive. I cannot select the internal hard drive in the side pane so unsure how I can reformat.
I have reinstalled to an External Hard drive but unsure how to move forward.

BUMP - please help me guys!

You are most likely going to have to take the MBP to an Apple store, or an approved Apple technician, to get the drive going again. If you booted from the Recovery Partition and still cannot even see the drive in DU, then something very serious has happened to the partition table on the drive itself. It may even need to be replaced. But Apple has additional tools and capabilities that they can use to try to rescue the drive for you. Everything on it will be lost, but at least your MBP will be usable again.

One last thing: Try an internet recovery (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314) to see if you can get a clean version of the OS downloaded. Again, everything on the drive will be erased permanently in the process, but at least your MBP will be useable.

Did your brother attempt to install winOS on it? There could be an issue with UEFI, where the drive will not show up anymore.