Can't boot from new drive

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Level 1

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Can't boot from new drive

I'm upgrading the internal drive in an early 2011 13" MC700LL/A macbook pro.

1. I bought a new HGST Travelstar 7K1000 1TB drive and put it in an external usb drive dock. I then formatted it with Drive utility as Mac OS extended (journaled) with GUID.

2. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old internal system drive to the new drive.

3. It cloned with no problem and I can consistently boot from the new drive while it's in the external enclosure.

4. I installed the new drive internally and now it won't boot. It just spins on the grey apple screen.

I can boot into recovery and the drive checks out fine with drive utility. But if I try to select it as a startup disk it says it can't be blessed. If I put the old drive back in it boots fine. If I put the new drive in the external usb enclosure it boots fine. I've also tried resetting the PRAM

I've found people with similar problems online and often a new hard drive cable fixes it. But they often are trying to install a SSD (which I guess is more sensitive to bad hard drive cables) and they also seem to get a system folder with a line through it. I just get the spinning circle and am installing a regular drive. Also it boots fine internally from my old drive.

Any ideas on why the drive can't be blessed and boot? I've spent quite a lot of time on this and would really appreciate any advice. Thanks.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Feb 10, 2016 9:23 AM

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Answer 1

AppleJoe

Community Manager

Feb 11, 2016 2:06 PM in response to Seggeth

Hi Seggeth,

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities!

I understand that your new drive isn’t booting as expected when you try to select it as the startup drive. To begin troubleshooting, I would suggest installing the new drive again and then reinstalling OS X on it.

How to reinstall OS X on your Mac - Apple Support

After installing OS X, try selecting it as your startup disk again.

Best!

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Answer 2

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Feb 11, 2016 3:10 PM in response to Seggeth

I’ve used CCC (and SuperDuper!) dozens if not hundreds of times as you have without a problem. As I was reading your complete posting I came to the same conclusion Joe did - try booting into Recovery, download OS X and install it. (I’d put the new drive back into the computer to do this.) If that fails, return to Recovery, reformat the drive, download and install the OS again. Assuming it reboots and begins the setup process you can then put the old drive in the enclosure and when you are asked if you have a TimeMachine backup or another drive, plug in the enclosure and pick it.

If you want to plan for the possible failure you could put the new drive in the computer, the old one in the enclosure and then boot with the external drive. Then download OS X to the old drive and install on the new drive. That way you’d still have the installer if you had to erase the drive.

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Answer 3

Seggeth Author

Level 1

0 points

Feb 13, 2016 8:47 PM in response to Seggeth

Well, I just tried a new hard drive cable and that fixed the problem. I guess some drives are just more sensitive to bad cables than others. Thanks for all of the suggestions.

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