New SSD will not boot internally, only from USB.

cronenberg wrote:

I had the exact same problem, and a SATA cable ordered from Amazon (this one http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KR5QIEU/ref=pe_385040_128020140_TE_3p_dp_1) solved the problem. A cheap solution to a potentially expensive problem.

In my case, my system booted from an external USB, demonstrating that the drive was fine. If you can't do this, then your drive is likely broken.

The SATA cable I replaced looks fine, and I wonder if anyone reading has the equipment to test it and identify the fault. Would be quite interesting.

No formal testing but it's a slender ribbon, bent in several places and then compressed by having a hot, rotating, vibrating, drive sitting on it. And then it gets a drive 10 times faster than the one it's been used to for years.

It's cheap to replace

I have a similar issue but have some additional hiccups to add:

MacbookPro 13-inch, Late 2011 (MacBookPro8,1)

2.8ghz i7

OSX 10.9.5

Crucial MX200 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" Internal SSD (purchased based on Crucial Website 100% compatibility with this model)

Like others: Connect SSD as external, cloned, booted fine as external. Connected internal, get the "?" folder.

Extra information:

1) In my case as soon as I connect the SSD internally, the system NO LONGER RECOGNIZES the original hard drive connected via USB. Once the SSD is connected, Neither the SSD on the internal nor the original HDD on USB are available as an option boot and system sees both as having an invalid file format (see below). So those who suggested cloning by connecting their original drive externally and cloning to ssd internal, this doesn't work for me.

2) If I connect the SSD internally and the original HDD via USB and then do a recovery boot, when i go into disk utility the system SEES THE SSD DRIVE CONNECTED INTERNALLY (challenging the 'bad cable' solution) it also SEES THE HDD CONNECTED EXTERNALLY, but both show a generic disk identification (not the partition name I assigned) and when attempting to verify either drive it says the drive doesn't have a valid file system. Again, as soon as the SSD is inside the drive bay in the macbook, disk utility is able to see both drives are connected--- but it not longer recognizes either as formatted despite the fact I can boot to either when connected the other way around (HDD on internal, SDD on USB external).

So not only does the SSD drive not work as a bootable drive when mounted inside the macbook (when it works fine mounted externally) BUT IT ALSO cause the system to see the original bootable drive as invalid-- essentially it breaks everything just by being connected. I would not recommend Crucial to anyone despite their 100% compatibility guarantee. I assume they'll refund my money, but I've wasted days messing with this.

Replace the internal SATA cable.

See, I'm gonna say I find the SATA cable thing hard to swallow... As I mentioned, when I boot to the recovery mode- Disk utility sees the SSD drive just fine, just doesn't understand the partition I made on it via the disk cloning process. This makes me wonder about incompatibilities between what the 2011 system expects to see on a drive (it boots to a Lion Era version of recovery mode) versus how a drive is formatted under Mavericks.

And to prove the point; I went ahead and booted to the recovery mode, let disk utility re-partition and re-format the SSD drive and installed LION on it via internet recovery. It works fine. I'm typing this response right now from the LION OS running off the SSD drive which boots flawlessly.

If the SATA cable were faulty; how does the SSD drive partition, format, install and run this 10.7.5 OS? I really think my case the flaw has something to do with the clone format. I'm going to try to update to Mavericks now and see if I can just then migrate from the old drive, as opposed to trying a clone.

You can do as you please, I gave advice, follow it or not.

Thank you guys, replacing the SATA cable solved my Problem. Couldn't believe it!

My Problem:

Macbook Pro mid 2012 with orig. HDD was terribly slow. Replaced it with a new Crucial MX200 SSD. Wasn't able to install/clone OS X, receiving errors like "Filesystem formatting failed" (not the real error message, translated it).

Took me a week to find out what the problem is. I thought it was a software issue. The old cable looks perfectly fine.

Thanks!!!

It's a very common situation. read this forum you'll find many examples.

I believe it has something to do with the EFI partition.

Macbook 1 has working boot drive.

Macbook 2 has new SSD, cloned, clean install, everything .

connect them with a firewire cable

Boot Macbook 2 holding T to get to target firewire mode, Boot macbook 1 with option key ( at this point I'm guessing its using its internal drive's efi) choose the macbook 2 SSD and it boots fine!

The first time I ran in to this problem It was with an older intel 40gb SSD, I replaced the sata cable, no luck. I found a firmware update for the intel ssd, and it worked. (but I wonder if upgrading the firmware somehow refreshed the EFI partition) I am now trying to put a Crucial BX200 480gb in the same macbook, and I am running in to the exact same problem.

After a successful clone with super duper I mounted the EFI partition and it was empty! I am not sure when the EFI partition gets created/populated.

So far no luck with the crucial BX200 and the Macbook Pro 7.1. When I boot the computer via USB, and check system profiler, under SATA the BX200 is listed and its smart status is verified. The BX200 does not show up in disk utility. Or when I run diskutil list in terminal.

I had the same problem.

Bought a new Samsung ssd 850 evo, to replace my original hdd in my all original Late 2009 MacBook: cloned the internal hdd using SuperDuper, tested via USB and all worked just fine, but ….

-When connected internally (SATA connector) the SSD, it did not work.

- Both, Original HDD via USB and internally SSD, it didn’t work.

- Back to, Original HDD internally, it works.

- Original HDD internally and SSD via USB, worked.

And in either, on the faulty combinations, hold any of the next keys : Option, command + c, command + r, or c, worked.

I’d been in many forums and the universal accepted answer was, that you have to buy an expensive cable, but for me, it doesn’t make any sense, due to the symptoms of the problem. So after many tries what really solve the problem was this:

-I formatted the SSD, GUID Partition and everything, through disk utility in El Capitan.

-Connected the SSD Internally through the SATA connector.

-Insert my old MacBook OS X install DVD (Snow Leopard), an error message appear.... then I choose disk utility and since I didn’t see any GUID format choose the default option and formatted my disk.

-Then a message, "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume..." . Went to disk utility again, and GUID format was then an option.

-After the final format, the hard drive was recognized, and the installation process starts…. a few minutes later I end up with an early version of snow leopard and a new SSD hard drive installed, new cables, NOT needed!!!!!!

From there, I updated to El Capitan, and used migration assistant from a Time Machine external disk backup, to get my old computer back.

Now, the old Mac is back to life and better than ever.

I hope it Helps!!!

You didn't replace the internal cable (the cable that connects the drive) do it now.

Just wanted to recount my issue in case it helps anyone else. I was tearing my hair out and was finding it hard to believe my SATA cable could have died given it's a non moving part inside the laptop.

I have a mid 2010 Macbook Pro and a few months ago I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a 1TB SanDisk SSD which made an astonishing difference. Then, a few days ago, the laptop hung and would not boot - would get part way through the boot process and then die. I still had my old hard disk, and could boot from that externally and then ran Disk Utility to check the SSD. It reported terminal issues with the drive which couldn't be fixed. After research, I booted into single user mode and ran fsck -fy which again reported terminal issues. I got onto the supplier who sent me a new drive which I mounted externally all fine, formatted, and did a full Time Machine restore, and could then boot from it externally.

I then put the drive back in the internal bay and it wouldn't boot. Some people report a folder and question mark icon but mine would just hang during boot - the progress bar would get half way very quickly then take much longer to get to the end and then nothing. Mounted the SSD externally again and it worked fine, so I knew the drive was ok and the issue was almost certainly the SATA cable. Ordered an original one, and followed the instructions on ifixit.co.uk and in short, it all worked perfectly first time! I couldn't believe it.

I never realised that a cable which is never touched or moved could fail but allegedly SSDs are harder on the cables than spinning drives. It was the fiddliest job I've ever done, and you need tiny Philips screwdrivers, plus something plastic to lever bits out (I sharpened the end of a plastic kids paint brush) and an earthing wrist band and ideally a magnifying glass. There are comments on ifixit.co.uk about step 11 and removing and re-attaching a tiny orange ribbon - this thing is impossibly small and takes some fiddling so beware.

That cable is folded under the drive, where it is hot, and vibrating, and SSD's transfer data at 10 times the rate of the drive it was designed for.. Failures are common (read this forum) but fixing it is easier than complaining about it it. As fixes go this is a simple one. Once you start believing it.

Mauricio R wrote:

I had the same problem.

Bought a new Samsung ssd 850 evo, to replace my original hdd in my all original Late 2009 MacBook: cloned the internal hdd using SuperDuper, tested via USB and all worked just fine, but ….

-When connected internally (SATA connector) the SSD, it did not work.

- Both, Original HDD via USB and internally SSD, it didn’t work.

- Back to, Original HDD internally, it works.

- Original HDD internally and SSD via USB, worked.

And in either, on the faulty combinations, hold any of the next keys : Option, command + c, command + r, or c, worked.

I’d been in many forums and the universal accepted answer was, that you have to buy an expensive cable, but for me, it doesn’t make any sense, due to the symptoms of the problem. So after many tries what really solve the problem was this:

-I formatted the SSD, GUID Partition and everything, through disk utility in El Capitan.

-Connected the SSD Internally through the SATA connector.

-Insert my old MacBook OS X install DVD (Snow Leopard), an error message appear.... then I choose disk utility and since I didn’t see any GUID format choose the default option and formatted my disk.

-Then a message, "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume..." . Went to disk utility again, and GUID format was then an option.

-After the final format, the hard drive was recognized, and the installation process starts…. a few minutes later I end up with an early version of snow leopard and a new SSD hard drive installed, new cables, NOT needed!!!!!!

From there, I updated to El Capitan, and used migration assistant from a Time Machine external disk backup, to get my old computer back.

Now, the old Mac is back to life and better than ever.

I hope it Helps!!!

The cable is less than $50, hardly expensive at all. Your mistake was not changing it in the first place.

Had the same issue. Replacing the internal sata cable worked for me. Ordered it from ifixit. I have 2012 pro and sandisk uttra ii 480 GB ssd.

Man oh man, it’s been a while since I’ve been on this forum. Seems like nothing has changed - I gave up on this issue almost 2 years ago but decided to try again... Maybe a mistake and wasting two days thus far. I thought a new OS release might solve my problem, but nope.

Background:

Trying to replace faulty internal OEM HDD with Crucial M500 SSD. Completely wiped SSD, reformatted as GUIDE. Downloaded OS X El Capitan, installed it on Crucial SSD in an external USB enclosure. Once El Capitan was installed on SSD, I was able to boot externally via USB enclosure to SSD - everything worked great. Fast as lightening, even using a USB cable as a conduit.

Removed SSD from enclosure; swapped internal HDD with new SSD. Boot up - disk not recognizable... It (still) makes no sense... I can’t even boot into single-user mode. But as soon as I pop the SSD back into the external enclosure (even leaving the internal SATA cable disconnected from anything), everything seems like it’s working great. Can boot into El Capitan no problem from external SSD.

Thoughts? I’ve already tried disabling and enabling TRIM via cmd prompts, didn’t have any effect.

EDIT: forgot to include that I already had an Apple “Genius...” replace my SATA cable a year ago. Was an ineffective solution.