MBP DOESN’T RECOGNISE NEW INTERNAL HARD DRIVE

manvirgarcha wrote:

MBP 13” mid 12

...tried few different new hard drives .

If you can put your old HD in an External enclosure and try and boot from there (holding the option key) this will bypass the internal SATA cable— a known point of failure. This would be a definitive test.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Apple/8211480/%20%2013%22%20MacBook%20Pro%20SATA

I've used Hitachi and Toshiba hard drives in Macs for many years without any issues. The problem is most likely the hard drive cable as mentioned by several others. It is also possible you could have received a defective drive as it does happen from time to time. If you find the hard drive cable is the issue, you may want to recheck your original drive. The 13" MBPro (mid 2012) was notorious for defective hard drive cables which was so bad that Apple actually would replace them proactively for free whether a fault existed or not.

Now you do have to be careful with SSDs because some of them are not always compatible with certain Mac models. I have been happy with the Cruical MX500 series of SSDs and have had no issues with them in the many Macs I've upgraded and they don't cost much more than a hard drive. Just stay away from the Crucial BX500 series as they are a very basic economy model. Definitely stay with a name brand SSD and make sure firmware updates can be performed on a Mac as many SSD brands only supply a Windows utility to update the SSD's firmware.

Most current SATA drives do not ship with jumpers. Even if they do, I've never had to touch them as the jumpers were mainly for locking the interface speed to SATA I.

Depending on how the hard drive cable is failing some drives may work better than others. Please connect your drives externally to see if they work or just replace the cable as it is not expensive. If the drives work externally, then the issue is confirmed (99%) to be with the internal hard drive cable. Apple proactively replaced these cables for free regardless if a problem had been reported. That should tell you something right there as I've never known Apple to replace a part proactively before. Just search this forum and you will find hundreds of threads where a people with seemingly bad drives begins to work after replacing the internal hard drive cable.

As I've said, I've used Hitachi drives in lots of Macs without any issues. Apple even uses the Hitachi drives. Laptop hard drives are just laptop hard drives. They are old & "reliable" technology and a hard drive will just work. Now an SSD on the other hand is a much different story.

Yes, test to see if it is the cable. And, as an aside, you really do not want a 5400 rpm drive, they are glacially slow.

Did you install a OS on the hard drive?

Is it brand new? Try booting into OS X Utilities to check the internal drive

If you check macsales.com (recommended for the cable), they will offer SSDs and HDs grouped by Mac model ID's. I have the same MBP model and have changed the glacially slow 5400 rpm to an SSD and also increased the RAM - both have worked flawlessly for several years and both were bought at macsales.com.

Yeah-just a crapshoot. Check back/rear of drive. By SATA data/power socket. There may be a bank of 6 pins in 2 rows- 3 each row x 2- with a little bar connecting 2 of them across from each other-or not- should be set to master otherwize do what babowa said and replace the sata cable

What model and year on your MBP? Did you also replace the cable?

So, Your greeted with the Flashing folder?

Maybe i can help. Check to see if there’s a jumper on the back of the drive. Should be set to ‘master’. You’ll have to format it in Disk Utility, once it’s plugged in all the way( under Erase/format) should be set to mac os journalled, guid ON. no hard drives come pre Mac formatted right out of the box. That capacity sounds pretty low to me, but what do I know. If you’re willing to spend the $ and and get a speed boost, you could go for an SSD ( solid state drive) but they are more expensive. You can also get a fusion drive which has a little SSD on a regular hd.

john b