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The smaller of Apple's MacBook Air laptops featuring dual microphones and 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity.

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enabled filevault now I have a black screen

hello everyone,

I have 2, 2013 macbook airs 11” a little while back i installed high sierra on the devices. when filevault was enabled it will no longer boot to a login screen. you hear the chime and stays at a black screen on both devices.

so far i reset both the smc and pram. tried to boot off multiple usb sticks with high sierra, catalina on them. tried to boot with recovery and internet recovery. placed the ssd’s in a cradle to try and format the drives and could not see the drives (on mac or windows machine). placed a light on the covers to see if there is a login screen (there is not). took an ssd out of a working 11” air and it boots up fine on both. i have the problem isolated to the drives. has anyone seen this issue and fixed it or am i in need of 2 new 2013-2015 drives? thank you for any help!

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You hit one of the issues with High Sierra! It was the first release of APFS under macOS, it has its problems! I don’t recommend using it at all! Either stick with Sierra or jump to Mojave!

OK now what??

You’ll need to leverage Target Disk Mode to gain access to the bad SSD. Sadly, you won’t be able to recover the user accounts, apps or data due to the encryption. Launch Disk Utility from your working Mac It needs to be running macOS Mojave.

How to Boot a Mac in Target Disk Mode

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thank you for the info, i thought the drives were a complete loss. Can the working mac be running Catalina?

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The issue is the version of disk utility. Catalina will work here too! But you want to make sure you format the drive as GUID/HFS+ Vs GUID/APFS that way you'er sure the drive will work in the system in case the systems firmware was not upgraded to the newer version yet.

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The macbook air’s will not go into target mode. i have OS X catalina loaded onto a macbook pro connect the thunderbolt cable and still get the same results. i have come to the conclusion it might be time to purchase a couple new ssd drives.

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