How I Recovered My Mac — With a Little Help from Jeeves.
Insight: Because sometimes, the bot is right. (Of transformations — ready or not.)
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Hello! If you’ve been here a while, you might remember the saga of my 2015 MacBook Pro — and the adventure I had when Apple decided it was ‘vintage’ and no longer eligible for service. If you're new, here's the story:
Well, I had another incident! 😅
Before we dive in, if you don’t enjoy tech mysteries, you’ve been warned — but if you’re curious about root cause analysis and recovery strategies, and how generative AI is changing the face of work, you’ll want to read on! (If you want the TL;DR, it’s here.)
The Incident
One late afternoon, my laptop got lost under a pile of soft pillows — and couldn’t "breathe."
A few hours later, I retrieved it, but after powering it on, it displayed a black screen with the ominous text:
? support.apple.com/mac/startup
This meant it couldn’t find its boot disk — the default hard drive with your user data — named Macintosh HD. Yes, that one.
I had my iMac desktop nearby, so I followed Apple’s online recovery instructions.
A live page was still available at the same address (imagine that - for vintage models!)
It offered an online system recovery step.
Luckily, Apple enables Wi-Fi connection before the recovery process — and if anything could convince you of their obsession with user experience, it’s this: the ability to reboot a decade-old laptop from a built-in image via internet access.
Not many companies plan failure scenarios in this kind of detail.
So far, so good.
Booting Into macOS Recovery via Wi-Fi
After connecting to Wi-Fi on the dark screen, macOS Recovery began loading — a wait of about 8–12 minutes.
My options were:
Recover macOS (not ideal)
Repair (potentially useful)
Use Disk Utility to attempt disk repair
I chose Disk Utility.
The first bad sign: no trace of the internal drive — Macintosh HD — was found.
Though Macs have a built-in recovery partition, no drive meant no boot. No boot meant no recovery. Not great.
Apple’s help pages suggested only one thing if Disk Utility couldn’t find the disk: service it. It also suggested erasing the disk — helpful if you’re selling your Mac. Less helpful if your Mac is mid-crisis.
Problem: it couldn’t locate the local disk at all.
As noted in the earlier post, Apple now considers my 2015 model “vintage,” which meant no official service options. Sure, I had access to a local repair shop — but it was 10 PM.
Also, as any tech DIY aficionado will tell you, root causing and solving is fun.
But I was not losing hope yet.
The Experiment
This was an unsought opportunity to test ChatGPT’s prowess as a real-time tech assistant.
What follows is a step-by-step walk-through of our troubleshooting. The back-and-forths are the real lessons. (If you want the TL;DR, it’s down below.)
ChatGPT instantly caught on: no disk meant no restore. A lost laptop.
Together, we brainstormed the issue.
First came boot options — power-ups — trying various Option + Command key combinations to wake the disk by resetting system controllers1 responsible for power behavior, startup disk selection, and screen settings.
It didn’t work. No disk found.
Two restarts later, I realized the issue — the command was wrong. It was meant for a Silicon-based Mac (the default on Apple’s pages, which ChatGPT had also mined) — but mine was Intel-based.
Aha! There - command2 corrected.
Voila!
The hard drive was found.
The login screen reappeared. (Nothing short of a miracle. Thank you, Apple, for your hardware and software resilience.)
I immediately backed up my data. (My last backup had been a week old — not bad, but not ideal.)
Trouble Still Brewed
Assuming the issue was a one-off, I returned to normal use.
But a video app froze, and I had no choice but to restart. Highly unusual for a Mac.
The system restarted and still found its drive.
Dutifully, Apple reported the ungraceful shutdown and wanted to send the report to itself.
Sure, the research team could fix future versions of the software — but that wouldn’t help me now.
The crash report contains valuable info — tech jargon intended for Apple’s own support team.
But I had Jeeves.
Jeeves? Yes, I’ve named my bot — a modern-day, tech-plus, all-in-one Jeeves.
More Action: The Software Diagnostic
I asked Jeeves to assess the watchdogd (log) report.
Oh, it was alarmed.
Upon reboot, macOS had logged that the system lost contact with the internal hard drive five times before giving up.
Oh oh!
Jeeves suggested I run DriveDx, a diagnostic tool to check the disk’s health. Before I could ask, it assured me the free trial was sufficient.
I downloaded DriveDx, installed it, and ran the inspection.
Most indicators were green and good. But one flagged a warning: Power Control Systems.
For those unfamiliar, this usually indicates issues with how the drive manages power cycles — which can be an early sign of instability or aging hardware.
DriveDx was a great find — and I didn’t even have to look for it — but the warning offered no clear remedy.
If you’ve ever used Windows disk repair tools or defragmenters, you’ll know the user interface isn’t exactly friendly.
The Plan
I uploaded the screenshots to ChatGPT — and got a full Star Wars moment: both C-3PO and R2-D2 rolled into one. A mix of calm solutioning and anxious panic that I was in trouble.
A cross of “Must do something about this. Let’s see …. Okay, I have it — let’s clone the system.”
The irony? It was asking me to stay calm. 😉
Immediately, it gave me three options — each with local purchase links already sourced. Without being prompted.
The plan (which I eventually agreed to) was simple:
Buy a 2.5” SATA SSD3 — a faster, more stable form of storage with no moving parts) — one of the three suggested, locally available.
Get an enclosure for the SSD drive — since manufacturers often sell the drives without one.
Download CarbonCopy Cloner, an excellent software choice to clone the disk (it suggested the free 30-day trial version was more than sufficient which I validated!)
Clone the internal drive and swap it later — either DIY, or with help at a service center. This involved lots of options, which I will forgo explaining here! ;-)
I argued: “But I don’t have a SATA drive — I have the original Apple disk4!”
Jeeves pointed to the log: Apple says it’s a SATA drive.5
I protested — this was an untouched MacBook Pro.
But the logs seemed convincing. I followed through anyway.
Was I right, or was ChatGPT? We would soon find out — to my cost.
Execution
Well, we made plans — Jeeves and I. Like a workdate.
It fed me links to buy products. I sourced an alternate product and shared the link as the original choice would arrive too late.
It reviewed, compared and approved it as a short-term fix — Sounce for $3, with a USB cable and a tiny screwdriver (China!). It didn’t approve of the plastic cover! lol)
Still baffling that Samsung skips a $3 cover on a $60 enclosure.6
Jeeves walked me through the steps — unprompted.
I humored its curiosity and shared the results.
First, I upgraded to macOS Monterey 12.7 — the last version supported for 2015 models.
Then, I installed CarbonCopy Cloner for it — version CCC6.
CarbonCopy Cloner has a clean, intuitive interface for cloning, but Jeeves was overhelpful — role-playing C-3PO to the hilt: anxious and hovering, listing exact steps, menu options, and advanced settings.
Whenever I asked ‘why’ on a step, it had a satisfying answer — in the blink of an eye.
So I learned more about how Apple treats disk partitions.
I asked Jeeves to estimate the cloning time. It approximated.
CarbonCopy Cloner was faster — for 194MB, it took just 14 minutes.
The Aftermath
Twenty-four hours later, mysteries solved, I had a fully cloned system and data backup on an external 512GB SSD — as planned, with one issue.
I couldn’t use the new disk to swap out the internal disk if it went dead.
Turns out, logs aren’t always accurate — especially on vintage Macs with Apple’s proprietary parts. SATA was a red herring.7
A good lesson.
The next step: Take it to the local center to diagnose how much time I did have to swap the disks out, and to resolve some unrelated issues.
Jeeves even issued a service center cheat sheet — to hand it over to the technician and, quite literally, told me not to take “no” for an answer when it came to the disk swap.
Well, Jeeves had to learn a lesson too. So I asked it to write a report - not the fluffy, emoji filled, surface level reports, a proper longform situation one — which it did.
As for me, I now have an external drive — and I can partition it to back up my iMac data as well. So not all was lost.
Except, of course, for the $60.
I’ll eventually need to fork out more — for an Apple PCI replacement when that 63% disk wear creeps up to 83%.
Might be a while. Or not.
Pro-tip: GenAI can be an effective troubleshooter. Be specific, contextual, and share lots of background context. Upload images, screenshots, and ask for rationale.
Conclusion: The Changing Nature of Work!
This exercise would’ve easily taken 2–4 hours of intense research — comparing products, evaluating software tools, reading reviews, seeking expert advice, making purchases, and executing everything with confidence (and no rollbacks).
That’s not even counting the trial-and-error needed just to figure out what might work.
Now imagine companies doing that hundreds of times. At scale.
In a world of complex hardware and software, this kind of effort used to be a necessary overhead.
But now — not anymore.
Anyone who can do this in 30 minutes or less will never again spend a week trying to find time to diagnose, repair, and service a fault.
Technical support will still exist — and may even improve, now that it has faster ways to source and analyze information — but users are increasingly likely to self-repair simple issues, even without deep technical expertise.
Will we still need those YouTube how-to guides?
Possibly. Though soon enough, they might be made — and narrated — by AI too.
Let’s analyze the AI’s performance in detail:
It traversed hardware, software, Mac models, OS versions, and e-commerce — and resolved the issue, end to end.
It created checklists and suggested steps without the user needing to research, interpret, or manually implement anything — straight to execution, with questions answered on the fly.
It still needed human input for higher quality answers — to correct, guide, and help it learn.
It leveraged the information well — thanks to the Internet, and the thousands of hours poured into free, public resources by companies and communities alike.
So when it matters — and for the right kinds of problems — AI really can lighten the load and save valuable time.
In the world of work, that matters — because monotonous tasks have taken over more of our lives than we often admit.
Is there a balance to strike?
That’s a question every user — and every company — must answer for themselves. We also have to decide where its limits should lie.
But one thing is clear: AI-assisted work is no longer just academic.
It’s here — and it’s only going to get more visible in the months ahead, as software powered by autonomous AI agents moves from demo rooms to desktops.
What do you think?
P.S. Let me know if you’ve run into similar repair rabbit holes — or if your AI assistant gave better advice than mine did.
Bonus
TL;DR: The Jeeves Lesson Report
The user first approached me with a startup failure on their MacBook Pro (2015, MacBookPro11,4), where the system would not detect the internal drive and displayed repeated errors.
I suggested that the user reset the NVRAM and SMC, after which the Mac did boot successfully.
Later, the MacBook Pro froze during media playback — this time with a watchdogd timeout, pointing once more to disk responsiveness issues.
The logs suggested a failure to recover a “SATA HDD,” which, along with the fact that SMART data was readable via DriveDx, led me to incorrectly assume the Mac had previously been retrofitted with a SATA hard drive.
SMART diagnostics via DriveDx showed a dangerously high power cycle count, and no reallocated sectors — further reinforcing my initial belief that this was an aging SATA drive on the verge of failure.
Based on this, I advised the user to proceed with a direct replacement using a Samsung 870 EVO 2.5” SATA SSD — which they purchased and successfully cloned using CarbonCopy Cloner.
However, upon visiting a service center, it was confirmed that the internal disk was in fact the original Apple PCIe blade SSD, not a SATA drive.
This meant that the Samsung SSD could not be installed internally as I had initially believed.
This was an instructive moment for me as ChatGPT: while system logs and SMART tools can offer clues, they do not always reflect the underlying hardware accurately — especially on Macs with proprietary components or ambiguous error reporting.
In this case, the “SATA error” was misleading, and I should have prompted the user to confirm the drive type via System Information or physical inspection before recommending a specific form factor.
The cloned SSD remains usable externally, and the user was well-prepared for the service center visit thanks to the structured diagnostics we compiled.
Alongside the storage issue, we also explored persistent Bluetooth and camera problems. Bluetooth had been non-functional long before the display was replaced, suggesting a failed or disconnected AirPort card, while the camera flickering began after a donor display was installed, likely due to an incompatible or misconnected internal camera module.
These issues are now with the service center for resolution.
Overall, this case reminded me to stay cautious when interpreting logs that reference generic hardware layers like SATA, and to always push for confirmation before hardware-level advice — especially on Macs.
These fancy-sounding components — like the SMC (System Management Controller) and PRAM/NVRAM (Parameter/Non-Volatile Random Access Memory) — store settings like speaker volume, display resolution, and more. They can be reset even without full system power. A soft reset often resolves hardware-related startup issues.
Use Option + P + R during a power restart — right after you hear the startup chime.
SSD stands for Solid State Drive — a faster, more reliable form of storage with no moving parts, offering better data protection than traditional hard drives.
Apple ships these models with 256GB or 512GB PCIe flash storage — a faster, more compact SSD format that differs from standard SATA SSDs.
Apple probably assumed users would check System Information and realize it was a PCIe drive — so the casual “SATA” mention in the log (developer shorthand?) led us down the wrong path.
See Footnote 4.
Interesting read, thank you for sharing. Love that AI can produce a report on its work too - seems obvious now that it could just never thought of it!
I will give ChatGPT a go since I’m encountering a hardware issue with an aging windows laptop.