Chosen Solution
My internal drive is a 500gb OWC drive, inside of my late-2013 MBP. I can turn the laptop on, login, use it, and open disk utility, and it shows up.The issue is that I want to wipe this device and reinstall MacOS. I’ve logged out of all accounts, reset nvram, and booted into Internet recovery mode, and that’s when I run into an issue. Disk utility while in recovery mode no longer shows my 500gb OWC drive. It shows “disk 0,” which shows up as a drive with 1.28gb of space. Nothing else. My functioning OWC drive doesn’t even show up in the terminal when using “diskutil list”. Trying to move forward with the “Reinstall OS X” option leads me to a prompt asking me to “Select the disk where you want to install OS X.” Beneath that, there are no options. It’s just blank, like no hard drive exists in the computer.I’ve tried looking for other solutions on the Internet, but everyone with this problem has a dead drive. My internal drive is not dead. It’s working. I restart my laptop after this issue and boot back into macOS, where I can log back in and the drive functions perfectly fine - all my saved files are there, all my apps run as normally, and the drive reappears in Disk Utility.Any advice?
This is a common issue in this series as Apples recovery server offers out the older HFS+ versions of MacOS and the version of Disk Utility has no idea about APFS volumes as well as have the needed PCIe/NVMe drive you are using. So you need to setup an external drive with recovery service, then upgrade it to what your drive had on it (if already used) or just prep the new blade SSD drive using the upgraded external drive Disk Utility and the OS installer you used to upgrade it.
