Chosen Solution
HI again Dan!!! I have a problem man … Remember back in 2020 I opened my iMac and upgraded it with a Samsung EVO 1TB SSD. After I installed it was working … Swapping logicboards and compatibility between mid 2015 and late 2015? I moved to another location to work and left my iMac sitting on the table for about 2 years … I came back for a holiday break and for my surprise the SSD was not showing up on the iMac as before, thats strange because I remember it was fully working and the iMac recognized it in Disk Utility but now it doesn’t show up! Anyway trying to solve this, by mistake, I invoked in Terminal this line “#diskUtil eraseDisk HSF+ mac disk0” thinking disk0 was the SSD… and BANG I erased my internal SATA Macintosh HD drive… I have two problems to solve now: To recover my data files from the SATA drive (I have a time machine backup from 2015.. to old) and to put the SSD working back again. What can I do Dan?? Hope you can help me out on this! Update (08/09/2022) Hi Dan, So I have on my iMac two hard drives: SATA internal HDD that came with the iMac - The one that was erased - It was running MAC OSX CatalinaThe Samsung Evo SSD that i upgraded opening the iMac back in 2020 -It is not recognized by the iMac (but it was working in 2020) I dont know which version of Disk Utility i have used.. basically I have followed a tutorial on Youtube on how to the Mac show the SSD. I did all they said but erased the SATA main drive. I entered in the Mac Recovery mode and used the terminal to give those commands. From what you’ve said to recover my files i need to boot from a USB drive but how do it? I mean How can i make the bootable drive? I have a Macbook pro from 2011 that can help if necessary… And How can i use the Recovery software you’ve mentioned? Can I use a MACOSX DVD to boot? I have Two disc one with Snow Leopard and the other with 10.6.6. Will these Disk are of any use at all to boot the machine? Please guide me what do i need to do in order to recover the files!!
Sadly, I’ve not had great success in recovering APFS volumes. The file system is very different from the older HFS+ file system that is recoverable! But that was quite awhile ago! Things are getting better give this a try! ProSoft - Data Rescue 6 using the free version. At this point your actions will make the difference in the data recovery. You need to create an external bootable drive and the size of this drive needs to be bigger than your internal SSD drives used data space. The reason is the recovery process will move the files to this drive and as you wiped the volume this might require a a larger drive. So what happened?? I’m suspecting you used an older version of Disk Utility which doesn’t know how to access the newer APFS volumes. I’ve seen that a few times now as people use an older Sierra boot drive to boot up the system or used the recovery partition OS which is Sierra or older. Even High Sierra has issues! As Apple altered the APFS file system in Mojave so the older High Sierra Disk Utility won’t work properly either! By why did I loose access to my system if the drive was OK?? Simply put the PRAM battery died! If you remember it sits on the back side of the logic board you’ll need to pick up a fresh BR2032 battery!
