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Had a user come back from summer break and boot his iMac. Jamf shows that it last checked-in early June. It boots to the recovery partition and Disk Utility shows the drive as empty. It may have had a power surge? The only reasonable explanation I have is that it was on and received the 10.13.6 update and was erased. Usually an update will never wipe the drive first.

Any thoughts?

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  • There is a back-up ?
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Aug 14, 2018 at 20:19
  • Nope, the user didn't have one, which is on them as they are told not to leave data on their local drives.
    – piagetblix
    Commented Aug 14, 2018 at 20:26
  • Personally seems impossible that this could happen accidentally, seems much more likely that some how it was formatted, powering off the machine and booting into Recovery Mode it will not report to Jamf and will allow the drive to be wiped.
    – unknowndomain
    Commented Aug 14, 2018 at 23:28

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A power surge isn't going to erase a drive. Destroy it maybe, but erase the main partition while leaving the Recovery partition intact is virtually impossible.

If it was a power surge, the internal power supply would have been fried. If that didn't fry the computer the greater than 18V DC along the power rails would surely have fried (at a minimum) the SMC (which operates on 5V and 3V DC).

What has happened is the user erased the drive in an attempt to bypass restrictions. I've seen my share of students who ask how to bypass restrictions both here and at many clients. Here's just a short list of questions that fall into that genre:

The only resolution you can take (and what I still do) is the following:

  • tell them "That's odd. I wonder how that could have happened..."
  • proceed to put it in queue for repair
  • tell them that since they didn't have a backup per organization acceptable use policy (or similar) that their data is gone and the responsibility is theirs (you already indicated that)
  • document in writing with an email to the student

There will always be someone who wants to get around the system only to smack face-first into a brick wall.

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