Mid 2012 MacBook Pro with SSD fails to work

Stuart Carter wrote:

I have a 13” Mid 2012 MBP.

the hard drive died so I thought I would grab an SSD to upgrade it.

I bought the Samsung 860 QVO 1TB 2.5” SSD Drive.

put the drive in and tried to install High Sierra on it. Get the circle with the line through it.

so I done the internet recovery.

formatted the SSD to Extended Journaled.

downloaded the new os for the machine and still won’t boot.

i put the SSD into a USB caddy and installed a fresh OS that way.

sweet. That worked. So I thought.

started the mbp from the USB caddy with the SSD in it. Apple logo then boom. Circle again.

pulled the SSD out of the caddy and put it into the mbp.

same deal. Apple logo then straight to circle.

I flashed the PRAM and nothing.

I put another 512GB drive into the BMP and installed High Sierra and works fine.

put the SSD in and back to the circle.

only time I got the SSD to boot at random once and that’s but putting the MAC into safe mode by holding down the shift key.

it loaded to the desktop and froze.

so I’m not at a loss.

is it a format issue? Do I need to format the SSD into something else?

is it possible the motherboard has gone faulty?

any help would be much appreciated as I have been at this machine for a week and can’t think of anything else. 🤷🏻‍♂️

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/cd2ddd45-71af-45d8-8905-baa98fb97aa5

This model is know to have issues with the SATA cable:

This is an easy fix: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Apple/8211480/%20%2013%22%20MacBook%20Pro%20SATA

The caddy could be a curve ball, some of those models had a SATA II cable some SATA III.

6G SSD is suppose to be backwards compatible—but this does not always work out.

You main bay is SATA III that is compatible with a 6G SSD.

If you have an external enclosure to test the bootablity of the SSD externally from the mac, bypasing the internal SATA—this may well be telling.

External enclosure are inexpensive: https://eshop.macsales.com/search/?q=OWCES2.5B

Are you able to complete Setup Assistant and reach the macOS Desktop immediately after macOS finishes the install?

Or do the problems arise after you migrate from a backup? Or after installing apps?

If you cannot complete Setup Assistance, then before installing macOS on the new SSD did you actually select the whole physical drive to erase within Disk Utility? With recent versions of macOS you may need to click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility.

FYI, the internal hard drive cable on this particular model has an extremely high rate of failure so I recommend you replace this cable as well. Since you are having problems booting the SSD externally, then the internal cable is not the whole issue. Some external USB Adapters, docks, enclosures are very poor quality and can cause problems so keep this in mind as well.

It is also possible you have a defective SSD. You can try performing a hardware secure erase on the SSD to reset it to factory defaults which sometimes can also fix some odd issues. You can do this using Parted Magic which is a customized Linux utility boot drive which you can "burn" to a bootable USB drive using Etcher.

Option Boot the Parted Magic USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". There should be an icon on the Parted Magic desktop for erasing drives. Within the app you want to select the "ATA Secure Erase" option as this is the only option which will activate the SSD's built-in hardware feature to reset the SSD to factory defaults. If you select the correct option the app will prompt you to sleep & wake the laptop and to provide a temporary password for the erase procedure. Keep the password simple with something like "abc".

The last free version of Parted Magic is available from the MajorGeeks' website from the link here. This article shows the procedure for the hardware secure erase for the newest version of Parted Magic which definitely has a different look to the app, but the basics are similar.

https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/

It is safer to perform the secure erase with the drive installed internally although I have performed the secure erase using a USB adapter.

Do you have another computer so you can test out your new SSD?

I do know some users report compatibility issues with some Samsung SSDs on a Mac especially when installed internally. I'm not sure which models are more prone to issues.

It is also possible you have more than just one issue here. Freezing issues can be caused by intermittent memory problems. The lower memory slot nearest the Bottom Case also has a high rate of failure on the MBPros caused by broken solder joints on the memory slot. Third party memory modules can also be a problem since Macs are very picky about the memory being used.

Stuart Carter wrote:

Yep. You got it. Was the data cable. Able to change it with another old broken 13” model and ssd worked fine. Probably what caused the damage to the original drive. Thanks heaps. Appreciate you responding.

Good computing Stuart Carter ! Thanks for posting the resolve.