Internet Recovery unable to recognize APFS Macintosh HD

I just upgraded my MacBook Pro with SSD from 10.12.6 to High Sierra 10.13.5 which I deeply regret doing. I shut down and restarted in Windows 1709 Bootcamp and it somehow allows me to save a file to the Mac partition. After that, holding the Option key at startup only shows the Boot Camp Windows partition. I can't access my APFS Macintosh HD partition. I tried to boot into Recovery mode but pressing Command + R took me to the Internet Recovery Mode. I opened Disk Utility to repair the partition. It failed and showed me an error in red that reads "Verify Volume Failed: Unrecognized File System." disk0s2 is also red now. Why isn't High Sierra recognizing the APFS file system? Also, the version of my Internet Recovery Disk Utility is version 12.1.1 copyright 2012. How come it's so out of date

Best Answered by

Jenny Zeng

Answered on Wednesday, November 22, 2023

The error message "Verify volume failed: Unrecognized file system." means that Disk Utility couldn't verify your volume's file system. It may happen when your volume is corrupted or has partition table issues. This error can occur on both internal and external drives.

You can shut down your Mac and retry booting into the macOS partition. If that doesn't work, you can wipe your Mac partition and reinstall the operating system to fix the error.

Since your current Disk Utility version is outdated, it's recommended to reinstall macOS from a bootable external drive. If you have a T2 Mac, you can also try reviving or restoring your Mac using Apple Configurator.

Be reminded that this will delete all data on your Mac partition. So, you need to get your data off the partition first. To do this, you need to run Mac Data Recovery in Recovery Mode.

After your data is safe, you can create a macOS bootable installer and boot from it to format your Mac hard drive and reinstall macOS.