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MBP A1502 not booting after clean installation

Hello,

My brother had a Macbook Pro 2015 (A1502) sitting in his closet due to a HD failure, and recently gave it to me to try to get it back and running.

It has 8G of RAM and a 256GB Aura SSD installed which I assume it is not the original one.

I recently tried a few times to clean install a new OS on it but did not boot up afterwards (High Sierra and Catalina).

The procedure I followed up was by creating bootable USB -> Boot up with USB -> access Disk Utility and format the SSD as Mac OS Extended(Journaled) -> Clean Install OS.


During this process it seems to copy everything (the space used on the USB and the SSD after copying seems the same), but the machine does not boot up.


I tried by using AFSP instead of Extended Journaled but the Installation does not allowed me to move forward as it does not sees the SSD for install (Disk Utility does see it).


I thought that the problem may be the SSD so i bought an ASUS 512G SSD NVMe with adapter, but the situation is the same (seen by Disk Utility, same partition type but same result after install).


Needless to say that the results are the same using an installation USB for High Sierra and Catalina.


I was looking around on internet and found in a forum that it is possible that the MBP needs a firmware update for the motherboard to boot from this SSD as AFPS, but I'm not sure is my case and how to do it if the machine does not have an OS.


My last attempt was to load Time Machine back up from a Macbook Air running High Sierra, but I got an error message telling me that the Time Machine back up was APFS and not able to load it in the SSD due to compatibility.


Any help is appreciated as the MBP is in pristine condition and would like to get it up and running for work.


Thanks

Posted on Sep 11, 2020 6:02 AM

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Posted on Sep 11, 2020 6:10 PM

While booted into Internet Recovery Mode or from a bootable macOS USB installer you need to erase the whole physical SSD as described in this Apple article:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496


Since Disk Utility is able to see the third party SSD this means the system firmware has been updated to work with PCIe NVMe SSDs. You can only use macOS 10.13+ with a third party SSD installed. If the system firmware had not been updated, then you would receive "a missing firmware partition" error at the start of the macOS installation process.

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Question marked as Best reply

Sep 11, 2020 6:10 PM in response to jaimeag

While booted into Internet Recovery Mode or from a bootable macOS USB installer you need to erase the whole physical SSD as described in this Apple article:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496


Since Disk Utility is able to see the third party SSD this means the system firmware has been updated to work with PCIe NVMe SSDs. You can only use macOS 10.13+ with a third party SSD installed. If the system firmware had not been updated, then you would receive "a missing firmware partition" error at the start of the macOS installation process.

MBP A1502 not booting after clean installation

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