Macintosh HD erased by Disk Utility in recovery mode

[finjam]

2015 iMac 27" with Fusion Drive, walked in to find the machine on with flashing question mark folder. Performed or attempted all resets (pram, smc, safe boot). Only boots to internet recovery, no Macintosh HD volume.

I think there is a weird hardware issue going on, Disk Utility will not reliably display disks (only works after some restarts). I have two diskutil list results attached here, in one of them both the HDD and SSD show as disk1 and disk2 respectively (this is when the disks display in Disk Utility, image also attached)....

....but on the other list the SSD is down at disk15 with no identifier string (and disk utility just spins and will not show disks). Certainly the Fusion drive has come undone, and it certainly seems bad that the SSD is bouncing around the disk list on restarts. Hardware test didn't return any errors.

In both scenarios diskutil resetFusion is not an option as Terminal throws a verb not recognized error (this machine was running Monterey I believe). I had loaded iboysoft's recovery tool at one point and I believe I saw data on the drives, but I'm trying to load the tool again and i'm not having any success.

I'm not sure how to proceed. I suppose if it is a bad drive could I just use the HDD for the system? I know I could replace also.

Thank you for your time and feedback on my issue!

 

[Weaselboy]

If you did not do anything to cause this, and it just spontaneously died, odds are you have a failed drive. If it were me, I would just buy a USB3 external SSD and install the OS there and just run off that.

That is what I did with my daughters iMac when the same thing happened, and it worked really well.

 

[Evelz6]

My 2017 iMac crashed and I manually held the power button down to turn it off. It wouldn’t boot after that. In recovery mode I tried many times to repair the disk (untitled). At some point it auto unmounted the drive and rebooted into another drive I had (untitled 2). When I went back to recovery I realized the main drive was just gone, completely gone. Any ideas where it went and how to get it back?

 

[DeltaMac]

My first thought is the drive has died.
I hope you have a backup.

Do you have a fusion drive, or is it the original 1 TB hard drive that the 21.5-inch iMac came with on the base model?
Either can fail.