cgsecurity.org

2014 MBP Retina
2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
Internal SSD (a replacement by OWC)
OS X 10.11.5 (El Capitan)

My macbook froze while in use. The mouse wouldn't even respond, so I did a force shut-down (holding down the power button).
After restart, I got the flashing box with question mark, indicating it could not find a boot drive.
I restarted in recovery mode and ran disk utility. It showed nothing but the recovery partition.
I shut down and swapped in a clone. The mac started fine and functioned fine with the clone.
I put the original SSD in an enclosure and tried to mount via USB. It didn’t mount. Disk Utility couldn’t see it.
I ran diskutil in terminal and it also couldn’t see it.
After about 15 minutes or so (while doing the above steps) I got a prompt that the connected drive couldn’t be read and was aksed if I would like to initialize it. I said no.
In system profiler, in the USB section, the enclosure shows as attached, but there is no information about the drive.

There are some user files I would like to recover.

Considering that the drive won’t even mount at this point, should my first step be through Testdisk, DDrescue, or PhotoRec?

Can any of these be run without installing Homebrew? The current version of Homebrew available doesn’t support OS X 10.11.5. All the install instructions and tutorials I’ve found say to use Homebrew.

If your Mac does not even recognize the device, no recovery software can work. You will have to contact a professional lab for recovery.

Thanks for answering. I was hoping that wouldn't be the case. I read somewhere that if I could find the first and last sector of my lost partition that I could go ahead and intialize the drive and then re-map those sectors to the newly created partition - or something to that effect. Not that I know how to do that, but that that might be a way forward without sending it off to data recovery.

In any case, while I was waiting for a reply I tried and failed to install and/run testdisk.
I tried the portable version but got a message that it was damaged and I should trash it. I searched and found a thread here, reccomending to try homebrew. Their site said it *might* run in El Capitan.
So, I installed Xcode command line tool 8.2.
Then, I tried to install Homebrew, but I got errors for some components. Afterward, it couldn't install Testdisk. So I uninstalled Homebrew.
Then, I installed Macports 2.11.5. That seemed to install.
Then, I tried to install Testdisk from there, but it also failed.
Then, I went to get some food and took my dog to the park. He's a good boy.

I don't have a Mac. There is nothing to install in Windows and Linux. You just start the compiled executables in admin mode.
Look at the manual TestDisk.PDF to learn which one to download for your version of the Apple operating system.