Mac-u-ser wrote:
• Both adapters are Voila Reve, one was sold on Amazon as non x4 compliant, another was sold as a good match for Crucial SSD.
Thanks for clarifying.
Take information from Amazon with a grain of salt. That adapter may be fine, but you are obviously having issues here. I have provided you with an adapter which has never seen a negative comment from any users on these forums for all the years I have been participating here. Other adapters may work, but when you are trying to troubleshoot something with limited options, you should probably go with the option that no users on these forums have complained about.
Disk Utility "View" "Show All Devices" does not see NVMe disk in High Sierra (external drive)/High Sierra Installer. System Info also sees only adapter, not the disk.
If you can select the adapter and erase it, then it will apply it to the actual drive if the drive & adapter are compatible and working correctly. You should, however, be able to see the physical SSD information when examining the Apple System Profiler's "NVMExpress" item. Access the System Profiler by holding the Option key while clicking the Apple menu & selecting the first item.
Bad SSD connector on the Logic Board (or its supporting circuitry) - I found that disk works inside with Catalina on external drive. It works with Monterey network restore.
Not entirely sure here. Once again you are not being clear enough. What I am getting from this is you can see the Crucial SSD installed internally while booting Catalina from an external drive. Do you mean the same thing when booting the online Monterey installer through Internet Recovery Mode?
So it physically works and is compatible. What I know about High Sierra is that it uses APFS for EFI partition,
No, absolutely wrong. The EFI partition (also known as ESP) is and always has been a hidden FAT formatted volume.
High Sierra does use the APFS file system when installed to an SSD. At one time High Sierra would default to HFS+ if installed onto a hard drive (no idea if the latter is still true).
APFS is completely irrelevant to your issues here.
but Time Machine in High Sierra cannot use APFS because it lacks of certain symbolic links. I will check out your suggestion to Install system instead of restoring.
I don't use TM so I cannot say how a backup from macOS 11.x+ would work when attempting restore data to High Sierra. I would not expect the restore/migration to work, however, launching the TM app and navigating to the personal files you want restored may work. You definitely don't want to restore/migrate any settings or apps from a backup from a newer version of macOS or it will cause problems.
At this time forget about TM and backups. Only worry about backups after you get macOS running on the new SSD. The only thing that matters at this point is getting macOS installed to the new SSD.
However, EFI and preloader could be equally fixed with some Open Core, last I saw there was NVMe option in it.
No reason to go here when you are working with an OS officially supported by Apple for your laptop. You will find even less help from contributors with that configuration since few people use it, plus the moderators may remove posts about it.
If installing macOS 10.13 to 11.x does not work using the instructions I've provided here, then it means one of these bits of hardware is either incompatible or faulty. I would avoid macOS 12.x Monterey at the moment unless you had already installed Monterey while the original Apple OEM SSD was still installed internally so that the laptop's system firmware has updated to the Monterey firmware version because at one time the Monterey installer would not update the system firmware if a non-Apple SSD was installed internally.
You need to stick with the basics and keep things simple when trying to troubleshoot things. Only worry about other more complex things after the basics work.
Good luck.
