Erasing Hard Drive and doing a fresh install before selling MacBook? SSD NOT showing up
*Please read this carefully as I posted this on another forum and ALL of the responses basically ignored what I had written in the post. I have to explain a few things so I can't keep it extremely short. Thanks in advance to those who know far more than me.*
So, I have newer Mac's and do not have much use for one of my old MacBook Pro's. I wanted to either sell it or let the family use it. It is a Late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. It came stock with a 512gb SSD but OWC made after market SSD's that would work with it, that required High Sierra to work. I ordered a 1TB a few years ago and installed it. This was around the time High Sierra was new. The MacBook started with Mavericks when it was brand new.
I started the computer up holding Command+R and formatted the hard drive. I formatted it APFS I'm pretty sure because that's what it was previously. At this time I had totally forgotten that this drive required High Sierra to run.
After that, in Disk Utility it does not show my drive any longer. So, I decided to see if I could get it up and running with an external HDD spinning disk. It reverted back to OS X Mavericks and did install Mavericks on the external drive. I thought I could upgrade to OS Catalina again and maybe it would show my internal drive again but it will not allow me to upgrade as a message shows up saying something like, 'Your computer does not have required firmware,' and something about a partition.
I do have an external enclosure that the internal SSD will fit into. I am thinking that maybe I can put it in that and go to one of my newer Mac's where the drive will show up in Disk Utility with APFS and install OS Catalina on it as an external and then put it BACK into the internal slot of the older MacBook Pro. Would this work? It's kind of a pain to have to do that but if that's the only way.
Some suggested to create a boot drive but I don't understand how that will work if the drive is not even visible in the MacBook. Plus, Apples website says a boot drive with Catalina won't work with Mavericks, if I read that correctly. BUT out of curiosity I tried it anyway and I did use the correct terminal codes on a new Mac and it would not create the boot drive. I don't know if the codes have changed on the brand new mac's or what.
Again, please read this before giving me suggestions. I know it's long but as you can see it has to be. Because last time I got suggestions like, "Just create a boot drive." "Go to Disk Utility and format the drive again." and I'd have to type back.... the drive doesn't show up.
Am I correct in saying the reason the drive is not showing up is because it's APFS and OS Mavericks didn't have APFS? If not, then what made High Sierra make this drive compatible but anything before High Sierra this SSD is not compatible.
I think this is the SSD I have, it's the OWC Aurora Pro X SSD, as you can see on the webpage it says, "Designed for High Sierra." It of course worked with Catalina and anything above High Sierra as well.
MacBook
