Entire “Users” folder is missing when booted into Recovery Mode

Question

I posted this in the Apple Discussions forums, but have yet to get an answer that applies to the depth of which this situation currently exists.

My Mac's hard drive (running Mojave) suffered some corruption recently, and I found myself unable to boot into the system. I am able to boot into Recovery Mode, and my intent was to rescue the important data sitting in /Users/(my username), but to my surprise, the entire /Users/ folder is just not there when I try to access it via Terminal.

Steps taken:

1. Boot into Recovery Mode.
2. Open up Terminal.
3. Navigate to /Volumes/(my OS drive name)/
4. Type ls to see directory tree. I see every other folder I am expecting to see (I think), except for /Users/. It simply is not there.

What I have tried:

1. Navigating to literally every partition and folder I can think of to find where /Users/ might be instead.
2. Doing "chflags nohidden" on the drive does nothing.
3. I don't believe I have FileVault on, so I don't think anything in that category would apply to my situation.

I can only come up with two possible conclusions:

1. The hard drive corruption annihilated ONLY the /Users/ directory (unlikely, I assume???)
2. Recovery Mode is hiding /Users/ in a way that I cannot figure out, and this is apparently not documented anywhere on the internet. I have seen other sites/posts talking about /Users/ being hidden, but they were not referring to situations similar to mine, and were resolved with simple (somewhat obvious) steps. They were not like what I am experiencing.

In the meantime, preparing for the worst, I have ordered an external drive enclosure so that I can pull the drive out of my computer and view its contents on another computer.

I am very hesitant to reinstall MacOS right now, because IF /Users/ has been compromised in the corruption, I don't want to do anything further that will prevent it from being recovered somehow. In other words, I am trying not to write any new data to the drive at all.

Thanks for any help or suggestions in advance.

Answer 1

I was able to use Disk Drill recovery software set to "deep scan" on the entire contents of the physical drive - and somehow, the software was able to reveal the Users folder. Thankfully, I was able to extract everything I needed from there (as well as files I didn't even want anymore, but that's a small price to pay).

I cannot offer any explanations for why nothing else seemed to work in getting the Users folder to be visible in Terminal/sudo, whether in Recovery Mode or after taking the drive to another computer, regardless of many different ways of initiating chflags -R nohidden on the ENTIRE partition, trying extremely convoluted chmod settings, verifying permissions, manually searching every folder I could imagine, mounting the partition in every way I know how, even trying to mount OTHER partitions on the physical disk that clearly were unrelated to the partition in question. I'm sure I'm forgetting a handful of other things that I tried along the way as well - and trust me when I say I tried everything I could find, even beyond the suggestions on this site, and I tried them correctly, with nearly 20 years of Mac experience under my belt. That's not to say I am a perfect human by any means (obviously), but I am also not a fumbling noob when it comes to this stuff.

I have no doubt that in time, someone will see this thread and have a definitive answer for the troubles I experienced. I absolutely encourage that person to offer their knowledge to the world, because whatever the true solution was, it is not well documented knowledge as of the time of this writing. Either that, or it was something so specific to my situation that it proved crippling and against the normal workings of macOS as a whole.

Answer 2

This is normal. When you boot in to Recovery, whether it be from your local drive or via the Internet, you’re booting a completely different instance of macOS.

If you want to view the /Users directory, you’ll first have to mount the internal drive to a directory (i.e. /Volumes) then you can navigate to it.

As for corruption of your drive, it is better to get an enclosure or a USB to SATA adapter, mount it on a “full blown” version of macOS so you can make an image of the drive and work off of that rather than risk further data loss.

Answer 3

Instead of removing the SSD, you can try using Target Disk mode. This allows you to boot from the Internal SSD on another computer. Try checking the /var directory. Have you tried First Aid on Macintosh HD (or whatever the OS Drive is)? Reinstalling macOS does not affect any settings or user data so that isn't something to worry about. Can you see an entry for your user accounts in /Volumes/(OS Drive)/etc/passwd? If you don't then that means that all your user accounts have been deleted. If you would like, you can also check /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users and check if there are any .plist files for your user(s). You can also try installing macOS on an external hard drive using macOS Recovery then try booting up on the external drive to see if you can see the /Users directory on the Internal SSD. Good Luck!