I'm trying to recover data from an old M.2 SATA SSD that used to be my boot drive for a Hackintosh. Initially, when I connected it to my new MacBook using an enclosure, it showed up in Finder and Disk Utility, but it was incredibly slow—Finder was stuck on "Loading" and Disk Utility went unresponsive. After disconnecting it during this hang, it completely disappeared; now I can't find it in Finder, Disk Utility, or even using diskutil list in Terminal. I'm worried that disconnecting it might have corrupted something. Has anyone experienced similar issues with drives not being recognized after a mount failure? I'm looking for advice on how to get my Mac to recognize the SSD again so I can retrieve my files. Thanks!
2 Answers
First off, try powering everything down completely, then power it up again. If it still won't show up, you may have a faulty enclosure or a bad drive. On a PC, if the drive appears in the BIOS, there's still a chance for data recovery using software, but I'm not too experienced with Macs. Good luck!
There's a chance it might be formatted in NTFS, which your Mac can't read. However, if it was a startup drive for your Mac, it should be in APFS format, which should work fine. Just to clarify, Mac can read NTFS drives but can’t write to them. You might want to check the enclosure or connection as it sounds like it could be a compatibility issue or a drive failure.
Got it! In that case, definitely check the enclosure and the connections; there could be a hardware glitch. Good luck with the recovery!
Actually, it was formatted in APFS since it used to be my Mac startup drive. That's why I'm really confused as to why it's not showing up now.