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Deleted important file, Mac won

Hello. I was using the Find Any File app to delete any and all files with the name "native instruments" in them and i accidentally deleted a whole folder in which a plist was contained, as i had pressed shift when selecting instead of command. I deleted immediately so I couldn't cmd+z. After this, multiple things weren't working (spotify would crash as soon as i opened it, preferences wouldn't allow me to click on Users&Groups, but i cant remember the error it gave me and i when moving an app to the applications folder, the username field in the "Enter admin credentials" popup was blank and if i entered my correct ones it would still not recognize the).

The only thing i recalll of the files being deleted was that one of the folders (probably the parent of all) started with a dot, and that one folder had random letters and numbers. Possibly also one called cp but i wouldn't be sure.

My dumb *** decided (instead of updating through system preferences, which i could have done) to reboot. Upon logging in, the progress bar started fast but got super slow towards the end and finally completely stopped at 100%, i left it for half an hour and nothing would happen.

I tried reinstalling MacOS through the Recovery partition, and the first time it gave me the error "Could not create a preboot volume on the APFS partition". I then booted into Windows, which is installed on an external drive and tried searching for solutions. When i went back to the MacOS recovery, upon running diskutil list I discovered that i now had a preboot partition, in the same disk as Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD Data. I also had up to 23 disks named "untitled" which were small in size.


This time when trying to reinstall MacOS, I no longer had enough storage (i was missing 8GB). After scrambling the internet, i went back to recovery and discovered I had a Time Machine snapshot from a few hours prior, but apparently by the time the snapshot was created i had already messed up, since after restoring (which took less than a minute) i was back to square one. At least now I had enough space to try reinstalling the OS again.


This time it worked, went all the way through and rebooted automatically but into a completely black screen. The computer is on but the screen is black. If I touch the computer, it is hot which i believe means its trying to do something. I held down the power button to force shut down and here's what i then tried, based on what i found on the internet:


I then went back to recovery and restored to the snapshot again. Fast forward to now, I reinstalled the OS again with no errors but my computer has been on the black screen without doing anything for about 45 minutes. I should mention that after the first time i got to this screen, when holding option during boot I could see a "macOS Installer" drive I could boot off of, and when trying, I was back to the black screen.

What the heck am I to do now? I cannot reset my drive, I have way too much stuff I haven't uploaded to a cloud and my latest backup is 105 days old due to corona keeping me away from my home drive.


Specs:

2017 13" Macbook Pro running the second to latest Catalina software


If there is any way to backup all my data to an external drive (about 100gb), suggestions welcome, I will be buying a hard drive possibly today. Also, the file I deleted is most likely a preference file.

MacBook

Posted on Jun 13, 2020 2:59 AM

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Posted on Jun 13, 2020 7:28 AM

You can try Target disk mode to recover your data but you need to have another mac.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/transfer-files-mac-computers-target-disk-mode-mchlp1443/mac

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Deleted important file, Mac won

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