Muscleman wrote:
Nope, I bought an enclosure. Put the 128GB disc from the Air in it. Started up the Air using that then fired up Disk Doctor. It saw the 512GB internal which I installed. It is now initialised. I'm downloading OS Install software to put on it.
What is Disk Doctor? Is it Disk Utility First Aid?
The fault appears to be that Restore Disk online Disk Doctor does not see the disk.
If this is Disk Utility, then it means you are booting from an a pre-macOS 10.13 installer which is unable to recognize a third party NVMe internal SSD since the older OS does not have the necessary NVMe drivers to access such an SSD. Plus Disk Utility Restore is a terrible option for attempting to clone a macOS boot drive.....it fails nearly 99% of the time.
I did say that third party SSDs become complicated. I would have explained if you had followed up by answering my questions.
This is an issue for Apple. The enclosure cost me an extra GB£69 to get to this stage.
No, this is an issue for you since Apple has never officially supported the use of a third party internal NVMe SSD in their computers. If you had purchased such an SSD from OWC, the product page would have clearly warned you that macOS 10.13+ was necessary for the use of a third party NVMe SSD.
FYI, Apple only supports the device configuration it ships from the factory. Any modifications a user makes to their device is on the user to understand & support.
I am glad you were able to finally figure things out to get it working. Good job!
