Chosen Solution
Hi, I have an iMac Pro (Mid-2011) in my lab. We are currently with an issue that we can’t solve. (I’ll try my best to be as accurate as I can describing the experiments I did and outputs I got) Problem: Every time we try to boot the mac it shows a flashing folder with a question mark inside. I accessed the recovery mode with cmd+opt+R. It takes a while because it does it through the internet. In the beginning, I tried to understand if I was able to re-install mac osx (data is important but we have backups of the important stuff). Thus, I used the recovery mode to reinstall it. But it gets to a certain point where it asks for a partition and no partitions are available. The list is empty. Then I went to disk utility and I found the internal disk with a strange name (ST_M13FQBL Media), with only 4gb and uninitialized. As you can see in the picture…
Then, I tried several different things: first aid: it was ok. Operation Successful. erase: Didn’t go well. It gave me an error. See the following print. (I tried to force the same operation through the terminal - no luck, same error)
restore: Didn’t go well. It gave me an error. See the following print. (I tried to force the same operation through the terminal - no luck, same error)
Then I used the terminal to unmount disks and force restore/erase. And I had no look. When I did diskutil list on the terminal it gave me a list of untitled disks.
I did some research in the past few days. It seems the disk is dead and we need a new one. Or the SATA cable or ports are not working properly. Can you guys please tell me what do you think about this? Do you think it still works? If yes, how can I repair it? The disk has 8 years (I think). We don’t care about data only about the hardware. Thanks!
Boot from an external USB drive. Reformat the drive and install a system from an installer on the USB drive. This should give you the repair partition along with the install. If you suspect the drive of having bad blocks, when you do the erasing, selection options and write zeros to the entire drive, this will map out any bad blocks and store that info in the drives directory so they will not be written to again.
