Ssd drive upgrade. Issues

First erase and then reformat the drive as Guid with a Extended Journaled partition. Which is what you need for time machine. You can format to AFPS, but you need High Sierra or better first.Connect a new backup disk to your Mac - Apple Support (BY) If you cannot get to safe mode, go to recovery and run disk utilities to repair your drive. Have you downloaded the High Sierra installer to your applications folder?How to get old versions of macOS - Apple Support Do you have 8 GB of free disk space. on your computer. More is better. Which you need to upgrade. When running in safe mode do not have the external drive attached. Same thing when doing the upgrade.

I don't use Time Machine so I may be wrong, but I don't think you will have a bootable Mac by restoring a TM backup without first performing a clean install of macOS on the new SSD. Everything else you have written seems to support this because I have not seen you make the new SSD bootable yet.

With a 2011 laptop you can boot into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R which should boot into the online macOS 10.13 High Sierra installer, in theory since some times Internet Recovery Mode will only boot to the online for the OS which originally shipped with the Mac. Either way you should be able to erase the whole physical SSD as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). With macOS 10.13 you may need to click "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. If the laptop happens to boot into macOS 10.7 instead, then you will need to partition and format the physical drive using the instructions in this article:

https://www.owcdigital.com/assets/support/support-formatting-and-migration/Mac_Formatting_6-10.pdf

After erasing the whole physical drive you need to quit Disk Utility and select the "Reinstall macOS" option. During the first boot of the new install, Setup Assistant will provide you an option to restore from a Time Machine backup. This will bring back all your apps & files to a volume that is bootable.

OK. I think I misunderstood what you did. You installed the SSD drive into you MacBook Pro after you used time machine to transfer your operating system to the SSD. Correct? If this is the case then you need to erase your new internal drive. Then attach the old drive. Boot up using the option key and select recovery from the old drive. Then reinstall the operating system to the new drive. After it's installed and you complete all the activation. You will, while doing that get the option to transfer from your old drive to the new. If not you can use Migration assistant to do it. Once you have transferred everything to the new drive, you can go to The App Store by way of the link I showed you and download High Sierra. Your new drive should show now as an SSD. Then if all is well, you can erase the old drive and use it as a time machine backup. Time machine can make a bootable drive, but it's not the ideal way to setup a new drive.How to get old versions of macOS - Apple Support

Have you got the new drive formatted and the operating system installed? And now you are trying to update to High Sierra? Or are trying to do the update first? Here is the only place to get the High Sierra upgrade.How to get old versions of macOS - Apple Support Once you click on it, you will be taken to the App Store. It will download to your applications folder.

RAREJUDGE wrote:

Ok I’m having an issue downloading high Sierra says alert this download needs 10.13 in order to download. I have macOS Sierra 10.12.6. Not sure what to do. Is there another newer upgrade I can do. ? The App Store won’t show me any upgrades at all even when I type them

in manually nothing comes up

You are downloading a patch to macOS 10.13. You need to download the full macOS 10.13 installer. To do this please follow the instructions we provided earlier. The links in the Apple articles posted previously contain links to various macOS installers. Please take the time to review each of the linked articles previously provided to you. Here is the Apple article which contains links to various macOS installers as well as optional instructions for creating a bootable macOS USB installer (this is the only way to download the full macOS installers):

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

Are you getting any kind of a message when trying to install High Sierra? Are you downloading the High Sierra upgrade from the App Store?On the Hynix drive, you should not need to install any software from Hynix to use it for Time Machine.Could you download and run Etrecheck and post the system report.https://etrecheck.com/ Hrer is what you external drive should look like in disk utilities.

When plugging in an external drive for the first time. If the drive formate is unreadable by the computer, you will get a message saying that and asking if you wish to erase and formate the drive. The drive should show in disk utilities anyway.The only way I know that you would get the flashing folder with a question mark is if your computer cannot find a bootable volume. If you have you computer set in the system preferences startup disk to boot to the external drive then you could get the flashing question mark. But then it would look for alternate drive to boot to. When you download High Sierra from the App Store , it should be installing the installer to your applications folder. No need to unzip anything. What operating system are you now running?

You have it right except for deleting old drive. You do not do that until you have run recovery from the old drive to install to the new drive. In recovery you would pick the new drive for install Then if you want or need files from the old drive. Transfer them to the new drive ether during setup of the new drive or later using migration assistant in the utilities folder of both drives. Then you can erase the old drive. When you startup using the option key you will see your new drive and also the old drive and the recovery drive from the old drive. You want to click on the recovery volume of the old drive. then pick reinstall from the menu. then you will see an option for what volume to reinstall to. pick the new drive.

You don't need to remove the new drive. The old drive is still bootable. Right? So it should have a recovery volume. With the old drive attached by usb. Hold down the Option key while booting up. This should take you to a screen where you see the new drive and the old drive and the recovery volume. Click on recovery then use disk utilities to erase the new drive. Then close out of disk utilities and use the reinstall in the box on the screen. You will get an option to reinstall to the old drive and the new one. Pick the new drive. It will start installing on the new drive. Your computer will restart twice. Then you will be at a setup screen. follow the instrutions. In the instructions you will be given option to transfer files from you old drive. If you want to do it. When finished it will go to desktop. Then if you want you can erase the old drive from disk utilities in the utilities folder. And use it for time machine backup. You might want to wait till you are satisfied with the new setup before erasing the old drive.

RAREJUDGE wrote:

Do I remove the new ssd drive and reinstall the old sata drive.

No, you don't have to remove the new SSD if you can boot into Internet Recovery Mode (Command + Option + R), or from a bootable macOS USB installer created using the instructions in this Apple article:

If you don't have a good bootable macOS USB installer and Internet Recovery Mode does not work, then you can attempt @my ginger's suggestion for Option Booting to see if a recovery partition is listed as a boot option. If there is no recovery mode boot option, then you will need to swap the drives so you can boot into the local recovery mode.

The new ssd drive has everything transferred on it from time machine so.

Yes, you transferred your data to the new SSD, but you did so to the new blank SSD so the SSD is not bootable. Migrating from a Time Machine backup needs to be done only after you perform a clean install of macOS to the new SSD. A clean install of macOS will make sure the new SSD is bootable. Then and only then do you use Time Machine to migrate your data to the new SSD.

This is where your losing me. Don’t delete the new drive yet. ?

You need to erase the new SSD again since you need to perform a clean install of macOS before migrating from the Time Machine backup. Just don't erase your original drive yet since you still need it, both for booting the Mac and local recovery mode and for your data just in case your Time Machine backup has a problem.