How is it possible that all APFS volumes including external backups die at once?

[antagon]

Hi guys I´m pretty desperate and I hope that someone has an idea what happened to my machine yesterday and maybe how can I get my data back.

So that´s what happened (very briefly):

I played around for 2 days with the Catalina dev beta. Then I wanted to go back to Mojave, booted into my external Mojave backup to restore it to my internal system drive via CCC. Worked as always (already did it 100 times in the last ten years).
After the successful restore I wanted to repair rights & rebuild caches on my internal system drive (was still working from my backup system). KCPM Tools crashed during the cache rebuild, so did the whole backup system.

I restarted the machine and I already couldn´t see the external backup partition on Clovers boot screen anymore. Anyways, I wanted to go back to internal system drive which was shown and tried to boot.
Didn´t work, I had a graphics bug I´ve never seen before, system was unworkable. After a lot of trying I decided to reinstall a fresh system via boot stick. Worked perfectly as always.
Back into the new system I couldn´t access any APFS drives I was using before. They are all gone and unreadable. Disk Utilty & Terminal screenshot attached...

I´m more than lost here now. What I tried so far with no succcess at all:
-> Disk Utility mount & repair
-> Terminal mount & repair
-> Disk Warrior (partitions are unreadable)
-> Tech Tools 11 repair options

That is probably the worst **** ever happened to me since I work professionally with computers. Actually I thought something like that is impossible, otherwise I would have backed up my whole machine to my diskstation as well and not only to external HDs...
Maybe it´s worth to mention that all drives with APFS I use are affected -> regular HDs, SSDs & NVME SSDs from ten years old to new...

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi guys I´m pretty desperate and I hope that someone has an idea what happened to my machine yesterday and maybe how can I get my data back.

So that´s what happened (very briefly):

I played around for 2 days with the Catalina dev beta. Then I wanted to go back to Mojave, booted into my external Mojave backup to restore it to my internal system drive via CCC. Worked as always (already did it 100 times in the last ten years).
After the successful restore I wanted to repair rights & rebuild caches on my internal system drive (was still working from my backup system). KCPM Tools crashed during the cache rebuild, so did the whole backup system.

I restarted the machine and I already couldn´t see the external backup partition on Clovers boot screen anymore. Anyways, I wanted to go back to internal system drive which was shown and tried to boot.
Didn´t work, I had a graphics bug I´ve never seen before, system was unworkable. After a lot of trying I decided to reinstall a fresh system via boot stick. Worked perfectly as always.
Back into the new system I couldn´t access any APFS drives I was using before. They are all gone and unreadable. Disk Utilty & Terminal screenshot attached...

I´m more than lost here now. What I tried so far with no succcess at all:
-> Disk Utility mount & repair
-> Terminal mount & repair
-> Disk Warrior (partitions are unreadable)
-> Tech Tools 11 repair options

That is probably the worst **** ever happened to me since I work professionally with computers. Actually I thought something like that is impossible, otherwise I would have backed up my whole machine to my diskstation as well and not only to external HDs...
Maybe it´s worth to mention that all drives with APFS I use are affected -> regular HDs, SSDs & NVME SSDs from ten years old to new...

Hi there.

I've a feeling this is a difficult one so my initial thoughts are ...

1) How many EFI partitions do you have in the mix? For reliable booting there should only be one.

2) Don't try copying anything anywhere, except to maybe the single booting EFI partition, otherwise you may overwrite something important.

3) You will need a UniBeast installer drive created with the same general macOS UniBeast utility, to boot from to eliminate all those spurious EFI instances, I think.

 

[antagon]

Hi and thanks a lot for you input, it is just one EFI partition, with my clover settings (located on my internal system nvme)
All other EFI partitions are either empty or with the file "EFI/APPLE/EXTENSIONS/Firmware.scap". I still got some soft raids running flawlessly.

Just to mention:
I already cleaned the least important drive. It wasn´t possible in macOS, I needed to delete the partition in windows. HD is back online, reformated and works again. Still hoping I don´t have to do it for the other drives :s...