MacBook Core M3 2016 Only OS X Base System in Disk Utility

[Rigo]

The MacBook boots to the logon screen with the username and avatar, the mouse pointer moves and there is one blinking bar at the top left corner of the screen.
Won't boot into safe mode.
Trying to reset SMC - comes back with a folder with question mark on it. Rebooting gets back to logon screen.
Trying to reset PRAM leads to a blank screen.
It boots fine and runs ok from a target USB drive but internal drive is not present.
Tried Internet or USB recovery, no drive present to select for installation.
diskutil cs list says - no CoreStorage logical volume groups found
diskutil list - a bunch of volumes of which only: GUID_partition_scheme Apple_HFS OS X Base system 2.0 GB - kind of sounds familiar.
Customer says if she can't get her data back, at least a working computer will do.
Got the suspicion it may not be hardware related but no idea how to bring back in picture the missing partition, drive should be 256GB minus what goes to recovery partition.
Grateful for any insight

 

[Rigo]

Hummm!!!
Just found this post describing exactly what I'm encountering.

Macintosh HD not showing up in disk utility

I've got a 2016 MacBook and the screen went black and a folder icon with a question mark showed up. When I went into recovery mode, the disk utility is only showing the MacOS Base System. On the terminal, when I type in "diskutil list", this is what comes up. And when I type in "diskutil cs...

forums.macrumors.com

Everything described including pics is exactly what I'm finding.
Faulty hardware.
Weird thing is the logon page is just normal, unless it's stored in one of the multitude of small volumes

 

[Markverhyden]

Her data is almost guaranteed to be gone. The steps below will guarantee it is gone. So make sure she's not willing to spend a lot of money on data recovery. The objective is to get rid of every partition so all there is is the single unpartitioned disk

In terminal

ls /dev/disk*

ls /dev/rdisk*
Do they show the same number of partitions?

diskutil list
should show disk0 and disk 1. 0 is the actual physical disk while 1 is the logical representation. The s# represents partitions.

diskutil eraseVolume jhfs+ drive /dev/disk0s#

Do this for all the disk0 and disk1 partitions

Restart the computer let us know what happens

 

[overburnz]

The 2016 models have a firmware/hardware issue, if you go to the local Apple Store they can run a test to make sure if a firmware update solves the issue or if the SSD is dead, either way the data is gone

 

[britechguy]

And if the client sticks with a Mac, for heaven's sake acquaint them with Time Machine and an external backup drive. Much as I am not an Apple fan, when it comes to Time Machine and ease of use, they have the best backup I've ever encountered for ease of use.

 

[Rigo]

Her data is almost guaranteed to be gone. The steps below will guarantee it is gone. So make sure she's not willing to spend a lot of money on data recovery. The objective is to get rid of every partition so all there is is the single unpartitioned disk

In terminal

ls /dev/disk*

ls /dev/rdisk*
Do they show the same number of partitions?

diskutil list
should show disk0 and disk 1. 0 is the actual physical disk while 1 is the logical representation. The s# represents partitions.

diskutil eraseVolume jhfs+ drive /dev/disk0s#

Do this for all the disk0 and disk1 partitions

Restart the computer let us know what happens

Thx Markverhyden
Whilst in recovery mode it refused to delete the partition



Then I booted from Monterey USB installer:



Then I booted from El Capitan USB installer - not sure what to try to delete here:


Whilst in recovery mode I tried deleting disk0 with following error:

 

[Markverhyden]

Well @Rigo this was more of a, as they say in American football, Hail Mary play than a sure shot at victory. When ever I've seen systems behaving like this, as in a bunch of random partitions, it's almost always permanently failed. I was just suggesting the above as that's operating the hardware at the lowest level. Once in a blue moon one might get lucky and resurrect a system like that but this isn't such an occasion.

 

[Rigo]

Well,
I had initially pronounced it dead, customer picked it up, then I had her return it for one last go.
You just put the last nail on its coffin so it will now rest in peace.
Incidentally, the motherboard on this thing is no bigger than what's in a smartphone, interesting build concept