I’m usually up late, so this is normal:

It’s late? Only 12:45am haha

Alright, so let’s use verbose mode to figure out what’s going on. OS X is pretty descriptive with a little -v magic.

I’ve never seen this before. Let’s try single user mode and fsck -fy /

** The voume Macintosh HD could not be verified completely.

It’s worth noting that fsck -drfy / wasn’t able to do anything either.

Time to bring out the El Capitan installer disk. Thanks to DiskMaker X, we had the installer running shortly:

Attempting to run First Aid using Disk Utility proved absolutely worthless

This tool used to be so good and reliable… Anyway, looks like a hardware issue with the internal SSD. I really hope not…but always assume the worst.

Let’s see if the filesystem is still readable…

Oh good, it looks like we can read the files. Yay! You won’t lose anything!

Took the computer home, busted out cp -R and within about an hour had everything backed up.

Time to experiment

Let’s give fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk0s2 a shot and see what it says:

This was expected. Wipe it with diskutil eraseDisk jhfs+ "MACHD" /dev/disk0

…is there hope?

Apple diagnostics?

Wiping it with diskutil didn’t help, so let’s give Gparted a go.

Boots right up with no problem. EFI ftw.

Created a completely new GPT setup. Attempting to install OS X again:

Left the apartment for 3 hours and came back to this:

Reboot with -v aaaaaaand

I’m about to give up and call it a hardware issue.

Hold on…

There is one thing I have never tried on a disk… zeroing

Hmm…

Pulled the SSD from my MacBook Pro because the Terminal on the installer is annoying:

Never tried this before…

Almost done…

Okay, so now it should be completely blank, no data whatsoever. Repartitioning the disk with diskutil partitionDisk and repairing with diskutil repairDisk now…

The issue was repairing the volume from before, so we’ll try that next with diskutil repairVolume /dev/disk0s2:

NO ERROR. Final attempt at installing the system:

Never give up.

Part 2 Here

Last modified on 2016-04-04