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The March 2015 update of Apple's 13" MacBook Pro Retina Display, model A1502, features fifth-generation Intel Core i5 and i7 processors and introduces the Force Touch trackpad.

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Computer Won't Power On & SSD Won't Mount

Last week the Macbook Pro was fully functioning. It froze while being used, the lid was closed and a few minutes later the startup gong was heard. Instead of starting up normally the screen flashed a folder with a question mark. A few chat sessions and one Genius bar appointment later they said that the SSD was full and that may have corrupted something, if I remember the wording correctly it was the file map, and that was preventing the computer from starting up and from mounting in any of the troubleshooting I did.

As there is no backup of the data I needed a solution. The genius said the best next step aside from data recovery from the recommended provider (DriveSavers Inc.) was to get an external sled to see if another computer would be able to mount the drive. An OWC Envoy Pro was purchased and the SSD was inserted. The drive still won’t mount using the OWC Envoy Pro. The OWC shows up in Disk Utility, as the SSD is encrypted using FileVault I am prompted for the password, seemly after a minute or so it unlocks but doesn’t mount and the drive remains greyed out. When I select the sub folder of the OWC enclosure, the SSD, disk utility freezes up and the spinning rainbow wheel comes up. Force Quit has to be used to shut down disk utility.

When I contacted OWC customer care after a long discussion they feel that FileVault is the culprit of the problems.

I wanted to keep the post relatively short, so if details on what troubleshooting has been done I can provide those. I am at a loss for what I can do here, any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!!!

Update (07/24/2019)

So the hardware that is in play is:

1 MacBook Pro with SSD issues

1 OWC Envoy Pro enclosure

1 Hard Drive dock with 2TB Seagate currently has Mac OS installed on it

1 MacBook working at 100%

1 iMac working at 100%

1 PC that I found cannot help because of stupid FileVault

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If you are able to restart your system in Target Disk Mode and have access to a second Mac, you might be able to recover your stuff.

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12 Comments:

Thanks for the reply. I did try that already and was not able to boot in Target Disk Mode or Safe Mode, etc. They said the SSD won't mount because of it was corrupted by the lack of space and the lack of space won't let it be repaired either.

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Target Disk Mode is independent of the drive. As an example if you removed the drive you would still be able to get into TDM as its held within the EFI (BIOS).

I generally don't recommend using full drive encryption (FileVault) as that does alter some of the BIOS flags which might be an issue here.

Are you able to pull the SSD out? If you are see if you can and this time leverage your other Mac in Target Disk Mode so you can use its drive to boot from or use a bootable external drive.

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Hey Dan, thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I was unaware of the potential issues FileVault could cause.

Currently the drive is removed from the original Macbook Pro and is installed in the OWC Envoy Pro enclosure.

I have tried doing target disk mode before, but not with the OWC enclosure. I will try using target disk mode on the iMac & Macbook I have access to.

On a side note, I did install a Mac OS to a spare blank 2TB hard drive I had and tried using migration assistant to pull the data. The SSD did show up, but it didn't let me move onto the next step.

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I'm a bit confused? Are you able to boot up from an external drive directly from your MacBook Pro with your internal SSD removed?

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@danj Yes I am able to do that. When I have been referring to a Macbook I am literally referring the gold Macbook model that the came out in 2015 with and was recently discontinued and not the Macbook Pro with the SSD problems. I hope this clears up any confusion.

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