dianarmulder wrote:
Okay so my wife's Macbook Pro (I am posting under her account since its listed on her Apple Id) a few days ago didn't boot up and there was a flashing question mark. So I booted to Internet Recovery and then Disk Utility and the drive did not show up. The only thing listed was "disk0" and under that, the Recovery partition (OS X Base System). I tried online suggestions but nothing I did resulted in the drive being recognized. So thinking the drive must have failed and since my wife had the disc about 95% full anyway, I ordered a new bigger drive and took out the old drive put in the new one. I booted up and got the same problem--a blinking question mark. I'm thinking possibly this is some other hardware issue whereby the MAC isn't regonizing the hard drive Any suggestions?
All new drives need to be formatted.
a new drive has nothing on it to boot to...
If you have another Mac you can create a bootable installer, this has a Disk Utility on it as well to do the formatting.
How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
How to reinstall macOS— after the Drive is formatted, it might be possible to use Internet Recovery as an option
Recovery (both M1 and Intel) — How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support
Can read some general info here—
boot clone How to create a boot clone - Apple Community
You don't mention the macOS...
verify you are using the Safari browser to download/initiate the macOS links.
The older macOS installer backups on this server:
How to get old versions of macOS - Apple Support
macOS Monterey
How to upgrade to macOS Monterey - Apple Support
