File Vault-enabled Samsung EVO SSD not recognized in El Capitan

Hi Paul,

If Disk Utility isn't seeing your drive, then there's a real possibility of a hardware issue with it, as I'm sure you're aware. Three things missing from your list (but perhaps you've already tried them) are:

SMC Reset:

1. Shut down the MBP.
2. Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source and to your MBP.
3. On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift+Control+Option keys and power key/button at the same time.
4. Release all the keys and the power key/button at the same time.
5. Press the power button to turn on the MBP.

Single User Mode:

Boot holding cmd+S. Wait for the white text to finish scrolling (takes a minute or so) and confirm you can type.

Terminal in IRM:

From Internet Recovery Mode, go to the Utilities menu (menubar), open Terminal and try the following:

• diskutil list
• gpt -r show disk0

-Max

Hi Max,

Thanks for the response. I did try these previously and the SMC helped to at least get the chime back. I tried previously in Internet recovery to have the disk utility look at the drives but Disk0 is actually internet recovery. I may have an SSD hardware failure but it seems a bit too coincidental.

You did inspire me to run system_profiler SPSerialATADataType and the only SATA device recognized is the DVD-R drive so even the SATA bus is not seeing the drive. I may have a hardware failure...

I will have to install the SSD on a Windows machine and run the Samsung SSD utility to actually see what has happened to the SSD drive.

I also may have to install an old SATA drive just to make sure I don't have a motherboard problem.

This is a Samsung 850 Pro and it supposedly had a longer life than the EVO.

I'm not doing any significant I/O on this drive so I'm nowhere near the wrtie limits.

This drive has been rock solid on Yosemite, its just too coincidental that it dies within 48 hours of an El Capitan install.

I am suspecting the changes in System Integrity Protection and the new functionality that allows TRIM and kext to co-exist is not quite there yet in El Cap.

I'll do a post mortem and report back unless anyone has other ideas....

Thanks,

Paul

Your proposed diagnostics of the hardware seem solid to me but I very much doubt that this is related to SIP or TRIM.

Paul,

If you can remove the drive to an external dock & connect it to another machine. Open disk utility to see if its shown & do a repair if it is. I had a hardware conflict with a usb3.1 card in my machine & it blew away my external drive vloumes. I mounted the drive on another machine & reoaired it & everythins was there & ok.

jeff

Hi Paul,

Something similar happened to me after upgrading my 2010 Macbook Pro with a Samsung 840 Evo.

El Capitan installed as expected, and ran for a few days without any problems. Then I experiened a system freeze and shut down with the power button. When I tried to reboot, nothing, just a grey screen. Eventually I got a circle with a line through it. I was able to boot into Recovery mode and then reinstall OSX not to the SSD but to my second hard drive. Once back in OSX, the SSD was recognized but it would not mount nor was Disk Utility able to repair it. Even DiskWarrior 5 (the only version to support Capitan) was not able to rebuild the drive directory and stated "Hardware failure (-5, 1921)."

Obviously with a relatively new SSD such as this one, hardware failure is extremely unlikely. I figured the behavior was a result of the upgrade and somehow related to Capitan's new TRIM support.

Online I read that the 840 Evo does not support Apple's TRIM without first flashing its firmware to the latest (EXT0DB6Q). Unfortunately, you need the Samsung Magician Tool to do this, and it's Windows only. (The alternative is making a firmware-flashing boot disk but getting that working on a Mac was too much of a pain.) Connecting it to a Windows computer at work with a spare SATA cable, I was able to inspect the drive with the Magician Tool. As expected, no hardware failure. SMART succeeded. It did however say that the drive had 0gb of usage, but I suspect that's because it couldn't read the HFS filesystem. So, I did the only thing I could do and flashed the firmware to latest.

Reconnecting to my Macbook, the drive was still not readable. I ran DiskWarrior again, however, and was now given the option to Rebuild its directory. But due to disk malfunction, it wasn't able to completely Repair the disk, merely gave me the option to Preview some of its recovered files and back them up.