Chosen Solution
My wife’s Macbook Air 13" from mid 2012 (model A1466) suddenly stopped recognizing the SSD drive. She was working, left it alone for a while and when she came back it was frozen and unresponsive. She forced a shut down (holding the power button) and when it restarted, it took a while and finally came to the folder-question mark icon. I booted from a Mountain Lion flash drive and ran Disk Utility, but it does not see the hard drive. I also tried booting from the network recovery with the same results and ran the Apple Hardware Test, which showed no problems. I haven’t been able to check if something happened to the connection between the drive and the logic board due to the pentalobe screws (I already ordered a set of drivers). Is it possible the the hard drive is not completely dead and the information can be recovered? (It’s still in warranty and I could take it to the Apple store). Could it be the connector or logic board? Is there any other test I can run without tearing it apart? If I manage to pull out the drive, is there an enclosure that I can use to test if the issue is not with the drive itself? If I take to Apple and they replace the drive, will they give me the old one to try and recover data? Thanks for any ideas you can provide. Fernando Edit. Found the OWC case and will order it if there’s a chance of recovering the data.
Here’s the issue Apple had a bad run of SSD units: MacBook Air Flash Storage Drive Replacement Program
No Apple won’t give you the old SSD back. But, they will test it and can try to restore the data. Often the SSD is to far gone to recover anything. Have you made any backups? Hopefully you have. I would first bring the system into an Apple Store to see if they will replace the SSD for free (they often do within the first year or so). If they don’t, lookup the SSD on the suppliers web site to see what you’ll need to do to get it replaced. If you decide to replace the SSD on your own.
This may fall under the “MacBook Air Flash Storage Drive Replacement Program”. Go here for more information: http://www.apple.com/support/macbookair-…
While this isn’t really an answer, I came across this post while looking for information about hard drives dying on MacBook Airs. We’ve had an inordinate number of hard drives die on our mid 2012 MBAs. We ordered 94 of them in July of 2012 and so far, in 15 months, 7 of the hard drives have died. Anyway, just wanted to see if anyone else is seeing a high rate of failure on these drives.
