Chosen Solution

Hey, So I’m a techinician at a PC repair shop in South America and this is the THIRD time this month that a client came in with this or a similar issue. After trying and failing to update to Mojave/Catalina it seems the SSD got corrupted. Now it’s showing up in Disk Utility as uninitialized or sometimes doesn’t show up at all. Neither when connected internally nor when connected externally to another Mac. When it does show up and I try to reformat it give this error:

The next step was trying to install to another SSD, which worked for a day. The next day after turning on the machine I got the folder with “?”. So I boot back to the bootable USB disk and lo and behold, the new SSD isn’t recognized either. I’m starting to think that the APFS filesystem is breaking/corrupting SSD’s as now I can’t access the new SSD externally either. I’ve also tried formatting on a Windows PC but the drives don’t show up in Windows either. Any help/suggestions would be appreciated. EDIT 11/27/2019:

These are the SSD’s in question, they’re Samsung SSD’s that originally came with the Macbook Pro/Macbook Air.

I feel like apple Disk Utility work only with the system loaded (may I am paranoiac), but for me every time that i am trying to format a HFS+ on a system with APFS or visa verse never work, and i always ending using the command line. Also I say that when you are installing new APFS system apple automatically update your EFI to support the new format, and when you are jumping from a older version it does not update, and you have to run a clean installation to update the EFI Chip.

Who’s SSD do these systems have? Apple had a recall on the Toshiba drives. Are they using the Apple custom Samsung SSD or some other drive? In this system you are using an Intel M.2 SSD with an adapter which is technically not a supported SSD in this system. You need to wipe it down completely using Disk Utility and see if the OS installer will install the OS. It might not!

Even it is M.2 socket ssd, but Apple SSD not the same pin. Apple use propriety pin arrangement. Putting in in Windows PC will not work and probably make it broken. You can try to put NVMe M.2 ssd, but it need special adapter to converted to Apple pin.