This disk that used to work isn't recognized at all now.
My Mac (mactel) got bricked because I was fiddling with triple boot setups, and at one point I made Mac unbootable. (Will describe what happened later in this question if interested.)
For several reasons, I used fdisk on Linux (Ubuntu on flash drive) to wipe everything off from that internal disk by applying the GPT scheme to the disk. The disk is totally visible as /dev/nvme0n1 on Ubuntu. However it's not on macOS's recovery mode.
When I go into recovery mode (did both Command + R and Option + Command + R but it's always El Capitan for some reasons), Disk Utility GUI won't show anything besides "Apple disk image Media". (It will show USB flash drive if I plugged them in.) If I move onto CLI version of it, diskutil list will return something like this:
/dev/disk0 (disk image):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme +2.1 GB disk0
1: Apple_HFS OS X Base System 2.0 GB disk0s
/dev/disk1 (disk image):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: untitled +5.2 MB disk1
# ..
# other 11 disks with similar stuff sized in between 524.3KB (half of those) to 6.3MB
# ..
/dev/disk13 (disk image):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: untitled +6.3 MB disk13
Whereas I expect something as follows:
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme +1.0 TB disk1
/dev/disk1 (disk image):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme +2.1 GB disk1
1: Apple_HFS OS X Base System 2.0 GB disk1s
ls /dev would not show much interesting output, and there certainly are nothing like nvme0
Are there more cleaning up to do on the disk (such as removing snapshots from APFS? Are these 13 disk images those snapshots from the disk somehow)??
And here is it for post mortem, more specifics for what this is and how it's got bricked.
Hardware
How it got bricked
Short version: I was trying triple boot setup, which was unsuccessful and tried to start it over by undoing it by asking macOS Boot Camp Assistant to wipe them off, which returned the error, leaving Linux partitions un-wiped. Now it won't boot up.
Long version:
Physical upgrade (Successful)
- Swapped with new 1TB SSD, formatted with APFS (I think), installed macOS from Time Machine backup. No hiccups, perfect experience.
Dual-boot (Successful)
- Installed Windows 10 with Boot Camp Assistant, just as Apple recommends. Left 500GB for Mac and the rest 500GB for Windows. Again, works like a charm as expected, no hiccups.
Triple-boot (Failed)
- Boot into Windows and use Disk Management to shrink the Windows partition. Now it's [500GB: macOS] + [250GB: Windows] + [250GB: unallocated]. So far it boots to both OS with no problem (although Mac's Disk Utility GUI might have not be happy with this, but I don't remember.)
- Installed rEFInd, so now it boots into rEFInd menu, and shows both Mac/Windows options, as expected. So far so good.
- (Try installing Fedora and I couldn't see no success, so I gave up. Wiped off new partition - and everything works just like before.)
- Installed Ubuntu but it didn't boot into Ubuntu although the rEFInd menu shows the Ubuntu icon (as it did install
/boot/efi into existing EFI partition). Now Windows won't boot.
- Reinstalled rEFInd, and now Ubuntu works, but Windows does not.
- Now it boots into rEFInd menu, and macOS and Ubuntu works, but Windows does not. I couldn't figure the fix so I decided to start over with simple dual boot setup the way Apple supports.
Starting over (Failed)
- Asked Boot Camp Assistant to wipe current Boot Camp. Took a few minutes doing this and that, and it threw some error (which I didn't take memo regrettably). Disk Utility GUI was showing something glitchy (which I didn't take memo neither), and it didn't wipe Linux partitions.
- Booted into Linux (Ubuntu) from USB flashdrive, and used
fdisk to apply new GPT to the disk.
And now diskutil list won't recognize the physical disk.
