help w/ Mac HD not appearing in Recovery Mode Disk Utility?

[noviceatbest]

WHAT I HAVE:
Mid-2014 13-inch retina. I recently replaced the original drive with an Aura Pro X2 SSD 1-Terrabyte drive. (First image attachment)

WHAT I'M TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH:
Reinstall Mac OS. I've already backed all data up manually.
Older OS is fine, actually preferable, because the main function of this machine is to run the long-discontinued Picasa app to manage our photos which won't run well within the latest OS.

WHAT I'M DOING AND WHAT'S HAPPENING:

• I start up in recovery mode
• I select "Reinstall OS X"
  OS X Yosemite window pops up (which surprises me since we're currently running High Sierra but stepping back to Yosemite is actually welcome)
• I select Continue under "To set up installation of OS X 10.10" and "Agree" to the license agreement
• A prompt appears to "Select the disk where you want to install OS X" but there is nothing there to select.
  
  
• I quit the Install and go back to the OS X Utilities window I started with when I started into recover mode.
• I select Disk Utility but the only items that show up there is something called "disk0" and OS X Base System underneath (Second image attachment), so there's no repair or partitioning or erasing I can do of the Mac HD. And I'm stuck.
  
  
• If I restart as normal, the computer and OS boots up fine.
• Within the normal OS, if I enter Disk Utility, the Mac HD is there (Third image attachment).

WHAT I'M HOPING:
Someone here can point out something for me to address so that I can reinstall the OS so that I can start over with a clean machine.

Thanks for reading.

 

[MacInWin]

A prompt appears to "Select the disk where you want to install OS X" but there is nothing there to select.

That may be because the drive is formatted APFS and Yosemite doesn't know anything about that format. And if you booted from a Recovery partition into Yosemite, it cannot deal with the APFS format. You need to go to the hardware level (Where it says "Aura Pro...") and format the entire SSD with the Yosemite Disk Utility. Then you can install the OS as you want using the HFS+ format (MacOS Extended Journaled) and GUID for the partitioning. How did you get that image of Disk Utility? Were you booted from the internal drive running DU? Is that High Sierra (which can read APFS)? You may end up needing to create a USB Thumb drive bootable installer for the system you want to run and boot from there, fully format the entire SSD back to HFS+ and then install the OS. You will lose everything on the entire drive doing that, but you said you have backups. BTW, make sure those backups are not on APFS formatted drives, as when you get Yosemite installed you won't be able to read that format.

 

[chscag]

If I remember correctly, when installing High Sierra, it used APFS if the drive was a SSD, otherwise it used HFS+ on a spinner and fusion drives. It wasn't until Mojave that all drives were formatted to APFS.

His Mid 2014 13" Retina MacBook Pro is equipped with a SSD.

 

[MacInWin]

Yep, and it's formatted APFS as shows in image 3.

 

[IWT]

I select "Reinstall OS X"
OS X Yosemite window pops up (which surprises me since we're currently running High Sierra but stepping back to Yosemite is actually welcome)

I'm wondering why Yosemite showed up instead of HS which is/was the current OS; and my thought was that the OP may have initiated Internet Recovery which would offer to install the OS with which the Mac shipped??

WHAT I'M TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH:
Reinstall Mac OS. I've already backed all data up manually.

If I'm correct, there may remain the possibility to Reinstall HS which was declared as the original intention anyway. - if Recovery was used.

Ian

 

[techiesteve]

I might be wrong, but am pretty sure the OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD required a minimum of High Sierra to function.

 

[ferrarr]

If you still have the drive that was uninstalled, you could use that to create a USB bootable installer,

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

Use an external drive or secondary volume as a startup disk from which to install macOS.

support.apple.com

A new drive has nothing for the Recovery (control/option/command+R) to find, so it goes into Internet Recovery.


Edit: I forgot to mention, if it is truly Internet Recovery, then you should be able to use Disk Utility to format the new drive so it can be seen by the OS to be installed. Just make sure in DU, you need to confirm in the View Menu

View> All Devices/Drives/Partitions has been enabled.

 

[noviceatbest]

Thanks for all your replies. Will need patience & slow talk because while I can follow directions well, I don't have conceptual/fundamental understanding of much. And actually, my tenuous grasp on much of what's being discussed on this thread makes me suspect I may just need to find someone locally who does repair work and just hope this would be a quick and cheap thing for them to do for me.

I failed in my What I'm Doing section, first bullet point, yes it's booting up from/into Internet Recovery. But from within that, I can't access the HD at all from Disk Utility, so I can't (re)format it.

I don't have the old drive.

I cropped out the menu in my second image. Attaching full image here and you can see their is no "View" option to make all devices/drives/partitions visible. When I boot up normal, there is that option within Disk Utility, but not from within Internet Recovery.

I can simplify my Goal here: Reset this machine with the oldest fresh OS as is possible with my specs. No need to save any exiting data. (Yosemite would be great, but it sounds like that may not be an option with the SSD drive it's now using).


Sidenote: these fireworks really get in the way when you're trying to write/read posts.

 

[MacInWin]

Well, I'm getting to the "stumped" phase now. In Post 1 you showed the drive booted into High Sierra and visible in Disk Utility. But on an Internet Recovery, the hardware doesn't even show up at all. Can you successfully boot into HS now that the Internet Recovery didn't work? If the Aura requires HS, you may be where you can be and want to be--on the oldest version OS you can run. According to OWC (macsales.com):

Aura Pro X2 is designed for the latest macOS versions (macOS High Sierra 10.13 and later), taking full advantage of the advanced features of APFS including: strong encryption, copy-on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, and improved file system fundamentals.

 

[noviceatbest]

Well, I'm getting to the "stumped" phase now. In Post 1 you showed the drive booted into High Sierra and visible in Disk Utility. But on an Internet Recovery, the hardware doesn't even show up at all. Can you successfully boot into HS now that the Internet Recovery didn't work? If the Aura requires HS, you may be where you can be and want to be--on the oldest version OS you can run. According to OWC (macsales.com):

Yeah, if HS is the oldest OS I can use with this drive, as was also suggested above, than so be it. Yes, I can boot into HS but I'd still like to reinstall the HS OS to see if it remedies some issues I'm having (that I won't get into here and further complicate my query).

A couple more read throughs of everyone's comments and maybe I'm understanding why I'm tied up and where to go from here:

Because this is not an original drive from Apple, it does not have anything for Recovery on it when I boot to recovery mode. So it boots to Internet Recovery which basically leaves me without anywhere to go because Internet Recovery wants to install Yosemite (being the original OS of this machine) which doesn't actually work with this SSD drive. So it's a dead end.​

​

If that's right, than I need to simply get my hands on a bootable HS Installer on a USB drive and reinstall from that.​

​

Anyone think I'm getting it... or getting it as much as layman can get it?​

 

[MacInWin]

Just do a Recovery Boot following this document from Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

EDIT: NOTE, do just a Recovery Boot, not an Internet Recovery Boot.

If that works, just reinstall the OS. It should preserve your data but put a fresh copy of the OS on the drive.

If it doesn't get to the Recovery menu, then the USB installer approach may be required.

 

[chscag]

I might be wrong, but am pretty sure the OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD required a minimum of High Sierra to function.

You're correct. One of our members from Australia ran into that problem when he was replacing the drive in his machine. At first we thought that was incorrect, but OWC Australia confirmed it.

 

[noviceatbest]

Just do a Recovery Boot following this document from Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

EDIT: NOTE, do just a Recovery Boot, not an Internet Recovery Boot.

If that works, just reinstall the OS. It should preserve your data but put a fresh copy of the OS on the drive.

If it doesn't get to the Recovery menu, then the USB installer approach may be required.

Okay thanks.

But I can't do a Recovery Boot, because the 3rd party HD in the machine does not have that recovery mode on it as the original drive did. So internet recovery is the only way it works and that only offers the option of installing which Yosemite for this 2014 machine which also does not work because the 3rd Party drive need HS or higher. It appears to be perfectly tied up. That's what started this whole query.

So I'll just work on getting a bootable HS Installer drive created since that looks to be my only option for a clean OS install, which is ultimately my goal.

 

[MacInWin]

But I can't do a Recovery Boot, because the 3rd party HD in the machine does not have that recovery mode on it as the original drive did.

The Recovery partition is created by the install process. So whatever put HS on the drive in the first place should have created the recovery partition. You said "I can't do a Recovery Boot." Is that you cannot, or you did not try? You have HS installed. It's working. Why do you think you need to reinstall it? Your original post implied you wanted to go backwards, which you cannot do, so what is the objective of pressing on with trying a reinstall of HS at this point?

If you think the drive does not have a Recovery partition, you can recreate one following this article: https://osxdaily.com/2016/07/03/recreate-recovery-partition-mac/

 

[noviceatbest]

The Recovery partition is created by the install process. So whatever put HS on the drive in the first place should have created the recovery partition. You said "I can't do a Recovery Boot." Is that you cannot, or you did not try?

When I Command+R on startup, it defaults to Internet Recovery. Doesn't appear to be an option for Recovery Boot from the HD which, based on the comments above, lead me to believe this 3rd Party drive does not contain the Recovery partition as the original drive did, which is why Internet Recovery is my only option.

You have HS installed. It's working. Why do you think you need to reinstall it?Your original post implied you wanted to go backwards, which you cannot do, so what is the objective of pressing on with trying a reinstall of HS at this point?

I'd like to have a fresh install of the OS to see if it remedies some issues I'm having (that I won't get into here and further complicate my query). I know this is a long shot, but I'd like to try. I mentioned Yosemite as being a good option initially which maybe distracted from the actual issue I was trying to solve, because my goal is only to have a fresh OS install, as old of an OS as is possible, which looks to be the currently installed HS for this drive.

If you think the drive does not have a Recovery partition, you can recreate one following this article: https://osxdaily.com/2016/07/03/recreate-recovery-partition-mac/

Thanks, I have not been able to download the HS install file required for either of those options. I found one update dmg for HS, but that's it.

Appreciate all the time and efforts to help but it looks like I need to move on from this fool's errand.

 

[MacInWin]

Doesn't appear to be an option for Recovery Boot from the HD which, based on the comments above, lead me to believe this 3rd Party drive does not contain the Recovery partition as the original drive did, which is why Internet Recovery is my only option.

It has nothing to do with the third party-ness of the drive. When HS was installed, it should have created the Recovery Partition on whatever drive it was given to install onto. Doesn't matter what brand, or when the drive was installed, or just about anything else. The HS Installer should have created a Recovery partition. If you cloned the system onto the new drive, then it is possible that the recovery partition did not get cloned, in which case you would need to recreate it.

As for getting the installer, does the link to the installer in this article not work? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683 ? Note that if you download from there, it will launch immediately. Just cancel out of it and the installer will be in your Applications folder.

To see what options you have for booting, hold down the Option key from power on until a screen appears with the options. If the Recovery partition is on the drive, it should appear.

 

[noviceatbest]

It has nothing to do with the third party-ness of the drive. When HS was installed, it should have created the Recovery Partition on whatever drive it was given to install onto. Doesn't matter what brand, or when the drive was installed, or just about anything else. The HS Installer should have created a Recovery partition. If you cloned the system onto the new drive, then it is possible that the recovery partition did not get cloned, in which case you would need to recreate it.

yes, it was cloned and I didn't know to make sure a recovery partition was included when i cloned the new SSD drive.

As for getting the installer, does the link to the installer in this article not work? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683 ? Note that if you download from there, it will launch immediately. Just cancel out of it and the installer will be in your Applications folder.

I'm not able to download anything from that link. When clicked, it opens a "Choose an application to open the itmss link." If I cancel it right there, nothing happens. If I select iTunes (the default), it errors out to "Item Not Available: The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. Store" if I select the App Store, it just takes me to the front page of the App Store with a "cannot connect to the App Store" window/warning.

To see what options you have for booting, hold down the Option key from power on until a screen appears with the options. If the Recovery partition is on the drive, it should appear.

When I do that, I quickly get the attached screen, i can either select the HD in which case it boots as normal, or enter my wi-fi network/password and then it just comes back to this same screen with my wi-fi network now entered, but no other options.

 

[MacInWin]

OK, so that proves you have no Recover partition. Cloning doesn't create one, most of the time. There is one more thing to try if you still want to see if you can reinstall. Open the App Store (I don't know why you get the "cannot connect" as the store is there. Maybe your iCloud login is incorrect?) and look at your purchase history. If you downloaded HS at any time, it will be in your purchases.

If you don't want to pursue the reinstall, maybe we can tackle whatever it is that you are having issues with that drove you to the reinstall. Might be better to start a new thread, though, so we don't drag this one on and on because the MODS here have been known to shut threads that wandered too far from home.

 

[Rod]

It is possible that if the clone was created with CCC there is an option to create a Recovery Partition which you can opt out of. I have never done that but it is optional. Perhaps this is what happened.

 

[Rod]

The only way I can think of to reinstal the Recovery Partition would be to erase and reinstall the entire macOS High Sierra onto the internal drive then restore all the data (only) from the clone.
The link Jake provided works for me Im not sure why it wouldn't for you unless, as Jake suggested ther is something wrong with your connection to the App Store.