OWC Aura for Mac Pro

If that is a regular rotating drive in a USB enclosure, why can't you install on it? It should not be complaining about wonky proprietary drive, contact manufacturer. You CAN install Mojave on a regular rotating drive, I have done it on an Internal 1TB in a bay in my Mac Pro silver tower.

Perhaps it is confused. Maybe you should try an SMC reset and PRAM reset and try installing again on the 4TB drive.

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I don't understand how "all of your stuff is gone" if you clone your drive.

Cloning creates an additional copy on the destination drive, it does not change the original in any way.

For example, you could clone your old drive to the 4TB external drive, boot from that external drive, then clone it to the new Aura drive.

I just successfully started installing Mojave on an USB connected SSD on my 2013 MP. I terminated the install and I am now clonige my Mojave installation to the SSD as a backup.

Just what is on the 4TB SATA drive and what is the format?

However, the message may be due to having the Aura installed in your MP. Reinstall the original SSD and it appears you can then install Mojave on an external drive.

What does Disk Utility show about the Aura drive? Make sure that under View in upper left Show all devices is selected.

Please post the list for all your drives, internal and external. (edit out the names if you wish).

I think lllaass is onto something, looking at all the funky little partitions required for EFI, for whole-drive encryption, for RAID, and and for APFS file format (introduced in High Sierra 10.13) which requires another funky little partition to do the encapsulation needed for Apple File System, and a different set if you were using an SSD for APFS.

I was trying to elaborate on Lllaass advice to use Terminal command:

diskutil list

to show the raw partitions installed on each drive.

Mine look like this (all drives are bootable, but hold different versions of MacOS):

$ diskutil list

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *80.0 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS X11-Drv80 79.1 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *120.0 GB disk1

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_HFS X12-SSD120 119.2 GB disk1s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk1s3

/dev/disk2 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *240.1 GB disk2

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1

2: 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC 239.8 GB disk2s2

/dev/disk3 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk3

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk3s1

2: Apple_HFS X14-Drv1000 999.3 GB disk3s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk3s3

My disk2 is interesting because it is an SSD with High Sierra installed, and therefore has the distinctive encapsulation partitions for APFS-on-SSD. Because of this encapsulation, It cannot be seen under MacOS El Capitan 10.11.

My disk3 is a rotating magnetic drive with Mojave Installed, so it does NOT have the encapsulation partitions of an APFS drive.

There are settings you can change in Terminal that will allow installation on an SSD without using APFS and its encapsulation.

A RAID drive has a different encapsulation, that appears to preclude the use of the usual APFS-on-SSD encapsulation and/or the encryption encapsulation partitions.

what you posted appears to be the completely useless "Volume-View":

what is needed to look at a Drive is Device View, which will show Devices by their immutable Hardware-Name:

.

The sidebar is not showing. You can that under View.

What is current macOS version on the Aura?

Do you still have the original SSD?

What is the firmware version MP?Click on the apple icon in upper left and select About this Mac. Then System Report. The firmware version is listed as Boot ROM version.