MacBook Pro A1708 booting issue, SATA cable replacement?

Hello everyone,


My MacBook Pro A1708 (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports), has been having booting issues since around the start of this year (2023). At times, when i try to turn it on, it will show a black screen with the flashing question mark folder. Sometimes, I'll try the command + R method, enter a wifi password, try using disk utility, perform first aid on whatever's available, turn it off, then I'll turn it back on. Sometimes the laptop will start up normally, other times it will go back to flashing the question mark folder.

The command + R + P + option method rarely ever works.

I've concluded, after many hours of research, the hard drive cable must be a little loose.

Does anyone know if any other MacBook Pro harddrive cables are compatible with my model? And are SATA cables and harddrive cables the same thing?


I'm planning on trying to fix this issue myself as I'm a young student with not a lot of money. If anyone could help me, or if you have any tips or insights you want to share, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance to anyone who replies ! :)


MacBook Pro 13″

Posted on Sep 14, 2023 8:14 AM

Reply
2 replies

Sep 15, 2023 8:55 PM in response to Wawawiiiwa

Most likely the SSD is failing. The SSDs on the MBPro 13" (2016 & 2017) non-touchbar model have an extremely high rate of failure. Most of the SSD failures will be noticed when powering on the laptop or when waking the laptop from sleep.....the SSD is taking longer to go ready which is why the laptop doesn't see a valid bootable volume. Most likely if you Option Boot the laptop, it will search for bootable volumes which may give the SSD enough time to go ready & allow you to boot without the blinking folder with question mark.


No matter what, make sure you have a good backup since the SSD can fail completely at any time.


The good news is that OWC does sell a third party SSD for this laptop. Or you can install macOS to an external USB3 SSD if you don't want to open the laptop to replace the internal SSD.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-pro-13-inch-non-touch-bar/2016-2017


There are no USB adapters for this Apple proprietary SSD. Besides, it wouldn't matter since the SSD is failing.


Just a reminder for everyone, that there are a lot of new ways to permanently lose access to data on the USB-C Apple laptops (doesn't always involve a hardware failure), so it is extremely important that people always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. macOS includes the Time Machine backup software for free....the user only needs to purchase a sufficiently large enough external drive (2x to 3x the size of the internal SSD) for the backup.

MacBook Pro A1708 booting issue, SATA cable replacement?

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