Intern 840 Evo SSD detection problem MacBook Pro 13" 9,2 (Mid 2012)

Hello,

about a month ago my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped booting correctly. All I got was the folder with the question mark.

Unfortunately this happend one week after my warranty ended so after trying some other stuff, I finally replaced the HDD with a friend's one, which seemed to solve the problem. Because the HDD was only borrowed and my old one seemed to be broken, I had to look out for a new drive.

Now that I had to replace the drive I thought I should replace it with a SSD, which was my plan to do after loosing warranty anyways. I found a really cheap brand new Samsung 840 Evo 500GB at Amazon's Cyber Monday Week and placed the order.

The day I ordered it, actually in the moment I told my friends I had placed the order, my MacBook froze, I had to kill and restart it.

After that restart I got back to the initial problem: the folder with the question mark. So I started realizing its not my old HDD, but something else.

I did some research again and found out people had the same problem, which was solved by replacing the bracket cable/SATA cable. That sounded plausible to me, because when I had a look at my SATA cable it looked a bit damaged even though I dont know how the damage got there.

However I made an appointment at Apple's Genius Bar, they just confirmed my assumption after running a diagnosis tool.

I didn't give it to Apple's repair service but to my local certified Apple reseller/service shop, just because it's just a 3 minute drive instead of 30. They replaced the cable, I turned on the MacBook, it took a load off my mind when I saw all seemed to work fine.

So I finally get to the point:

Now that I had a working SATA cable, a running MacBook to backup or clone my data and the new SSD, I was ready to build in the SSD.

I got the first shock when the SSD was not detected by Disk Utility (I booted from a bootable Mavericks USB-Stick), I put the SSD in a USB 3.0 enclosure and connected it to my friends MacBook. we initialized it and formated it HFS+.

But back in my MacBook it still wasn't detected. I tried a lot of stuff but it's still not working. My borrowed HDD is detected and working fine. The SSD is detected in a USB enclosure. It's formatable, I installed Mavericks, its bootable via USB, but again - not detected when i connect it internally.

It works perfectly fine in my friend's MacBook (I think it's an early 2011 15"). Its detectable, formatable, Mavericks is installable and it boots like it should.

I had another idea, I found out Samsung recently (Mid October) released a new firmware, among others fixing compatibility issues with "certain systems".

So I put the SSD in Windows PC via SATA (working perfectly), downloaded Samsungs Magician tool, and tried to update - but it already had the most recent firmware. Because it was already connected to a Windows system I thought I could try formating it there (I think I formated it NTFS and later tried again FAT32).

Back in my MacBook suddenly the SSD appeared. Due to formating it NTFS/FAT32, of course installation on that disk wouldn't work so I tried to erase the disk and make it HFS+/Mac OS (Journaled). But unfortunately that wouldn't work either, the process always stuck at "unmounting disk" and then quit with 3 different messages. One was about writing on certain blocks, one about being unable to unmount and the other was not really telling me anything else but that it failed I'm sorry I can't tell the exact errors.

After these errors I could retry this once or twice, then - what else - the drive wasn't even detected anymore.

I retried formating it via Windows a few times, and the scenario explained in this paragraph restarted.

I am sorry for this long story, but I'm out of ideas, I found a lot of people in forums with these problems. But either replacing the bracket cable or sending back the SSD/ordering a different one worked. Obviously replacing the bracket cable did not fix the SSD problem and I would rather gather some more ideas and try other stuff before sending back the SSD to Amazon or reselling it, because i actually wanted this one and i got it for a 20% off price. And as long as there is no good reason why it shouldn't work in my MacBook, I can't believe it's not possible to make it work.

So summarized what I tried

- update SSD firmware - already the latest

- test SSD in different MacBook/ multiple Windows PCs - works

- test SSD via USB in enclosurse - works

- of course reset PRAM/NVRAM and SMC - no success

- replace bracket cable - partwise success (not for the SSD)

There is one more thing that came to my mind today:

The day of the first questionmark/folder incident i tried to install a Ubuntu distribution for some Uni stuff. I used rEFIt/rEFInd (I'm not sure which one it was) to make it boot, and it worked for some hours. When shutting down the MacBook running Ubuntu and restarting it with OS X the questionmark appeared.

Formating the drive didn't even work thats when I replaced it with my friend's HDD. I already thought on that day that its a weird coincidence that I install Ubuntu and the bracket cable goes bad the same day. But with so much bad luck I have these days I could even imagine that. Then, when replacing the bracket cable solved the second questionmark/folder incident I was actually pretty sure it was the cable. But now that the SSD doesn't work and I remember reading about rEFI/rEFInd in the wrong use could mess with my MacBook's firmware I get paranoid and start assuming that this is the source of all evil.

Again, I'm happy to try any idea you have. I'm desperate and frustrated and just want a little lucky streak and make the SSD work.