2012 MBP doesn't boot

[Hoosmac]

When you say "Reinstalled OSX on the external drive and it worked" - does this mean it went through the OS setup (time zone, etc.) and you were able to boot into a working copy of macOS (OSX)? I presume that's what you mean.

If so, then the disk-not-readable would apply to the internal disk. If you were able to successfully install and boot from the OS, then Disk Utility will not erase that disk so it would apply to your internal disk. Unless there is something you want from this disk, you can try to erase it. If the SSD went bad, then it won't be able to erase the disk and format it for "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" which is the format you should use.

But, before you go any further, does the MBP now have a version of the OS that you want? It either would have installed High Sierra or something earlier than El Capitan based on how you described the Disk Utility app. If not, let us know and we can take steps to get the right OS on there.

Let us know if you can erase the disk or not as that will give an indication of what has failed.

As I posted yesterday I installed high sierra on the internal disk and it seems to be working fine;in fact it seems to be working better than when I was running sierra( There is a problem with Safari on a few sites but I will post that as a separate question). Now the strange thing is I first did a time machine restore to the internal drive and it worked horribly;kept asking for key chain passwords and beach balling terribly. None of that with a fresh install of high sierra.
I'm still wondering what caused the problem of not booting in the first place and the mac not finding any destination drive?
thanks again

 

[treekram]

From what you've described through all of your posts, I couldn't give an answer that I could assign a confidence level greater than 50% to.

It may be the battery - the error you mentioned may be because the battery is having problems rather than being a non-Apple battery (it would help if you have the error code). The battery, in conjunction with AC power may have some kind of erratic power situation which caused the problem.

It may be the "quirky" behavior of the computer that your daughter mentioned. However, usually quirky computers don't wait a year before exhibiting their quirky-ness so I'm skeptical about this.

Sometimes computers just have glitches and data may be written incorrectly to the disk. But if this is what happened, it's just very unusual with Macs and OSX in my experience.

If you bought the very lowest price disk cable, maybe that could be an issue, that goes for both of the cables you had (one new, one that's a year old - is that correct?). It could also be the cable connection/placement.

I could see that moving the SSD to the optical slot may help but then again what you have now may work without a problem going forward. Given the relatively low cost of the bracket, I probably would try it, but that's a personal preference.

As for your Time Machine restore, do you have an iCloud account? It'd be difficult to figure out what happened with the restore without more detailed information. You may want to consider a secondary backup in the form of a clone in addition to Time Machine. The clone will only keep data on your computer as it was at a specific time, unlike Time Machine it does not keep a record of your changes. Carbon Copy Cloner was mentioned in post #7.
https://bombich.com/

If you recall any type of unusual event that occurred around the time just before you had a problem with the first SSD, that could help in determining what happened.

 

[Hoosmac]

T

From what you've described through all of your posts, I couldn't give an answer that I could assign a confidence level greater than 50% to.

It may be the battery - the error you mentioned may be because the battery is having problems rather than being a non-Apple battery (it would help if you have the error code). The battery, in conjunction with AC power may have some kind of erratic power situation which caused the problem.

It may be the "quirky" behavior of the computer that your daughter mentioned. However, usually quirky computers don't wait a year before exhibiting their quirky-ness so I'm skeptical about this.

Sometimes computers just have glitches and data may be written incorrectly to the disk. But if this is what happened, it's just very unusual with Macs and OSX in my experience.

If you bought the very lowest price disk cable, maybe that could be an issue, that goes for both of the cables you had (one new, one that's a year old - is that correct?). It could also be the cable connection/placement.

I could see that moving the SSD to the optical slot may help but then again what you have now may work without a problem going forward. Given the relatively low cost of the bracket, I probably would try it, but that's a personal preference.

As for your Time Machine restore, do you have an iCloud account? It'd be difficult to figure out what happened with the restore without more detailed information. You may want to consider a secondary backup in the form of a clone in addition to Time Machine. The clone will only keep data on your computer as it was at a specific time, unlike Time Machine it does not keep a record of your changes. Carbon Copy Cloner was mentioned in post #7.
https://bombich.com/

If you recall any type of unusual event that occurred around the time just before you had a problem with the first SSD, that could help in determining what happened.

Thanks again for your help. The error code is 4BAT/6 / 4000000 5 0x8981c990.
I bought the cable from Ifixit. Have not set up iCloud. I need to check my info from Samsung as the first thing I did when the MBP would not boot was I assumed the SSD(which is fairly new) crashed. Sent it to samsung and if I recall correctly I did call them while they had it and was told it worked fine. I'm going to pull the documentation on that job and call them to verify if it died or not. But either way the macbook would not recognize that drive until last week and that's what I find puzzling in all of this. Neither the external drive or the internal drive were found for with new osx install or time machine restore.Makes no sense to me
will look into carbon copy cloner

 

[treekram]

Apple doesn't make public exactly what the diagnostic codes mean but sometimes there's specific information on the web on a specific code. Unfortunately that's not the case with your code. However, in the few posts from people who had the error code you had, they also seemed to have what seemed to be non-battery related issues so maybe the battery played a part in the issues you've having. If it's not too trouble, you might want to make an appointment at a Genius Bar at an Apple Store and see what they say about your error code and whether it could be related to the problems you've been having.

To check your battery health:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201585

This article is about battery cycle count, but it has information about how to get the Battery Information section in the System Information app and under "Health Information" if the "Condition" is anything but "Normal", you may want to consider a different battery.

 

[Fishrrman]

Hoosmac --

You are now able to boot the MacBook and get TO THE FINDER using the internal drive, is this correct?

But... you are having trouble trying to restore from a Time Machine backup?

If so, your problems are almost certainly NOT "with the MacBook".

Instead, they are with the TM backup.

Can we establish these facts before we go further?

 

[treekram]

T


Thanks again for your help. The error code is 4BAT/6 / 4000000 5 0x8981c990.
I bought the cable from Ifixit. Have not set up iCloud. I need to check my info from Samsung as the first thing I did when the MBP would not boot was I assumed the SSD(which is fairly new) crashed. Sent it to samsung and if I recall correctly I did call them while they had it and was told it worked fine. I'm going to pull the documentation on that job and call them to verify if it died or not. But either way the macbook would not recognize that drive until last week and that's what I find puzzling in all of this. Neither the external drive or the internal drive were found for with new osx install or time machine restore.Makes no sense to me
will look into carbon copy cloner

If you have the Samsung 850 Evo, they're generally good SSD's and they certainly have a good warranty. However, with Samsung drives using TLC NAND chips, they can fail early - an instance of which was mentioned in post #10. The last time I read the Amazon reviews, I saw several reviews where that happened. I also had a 960 Evo (also uses TLC) fail early in a non-Mac computer. Once they get over that early period, they tend to work well over time. If Samsung says your returned drive did not fail, I would tend to believe them. Given the problems you've had now with two different sets of cables/SSD's, I don't the SSD's were the problem for either of them.

As for Time Machine, it really depends on what you need. Cloning software will only get you back to the files that existed at the time you did the clone. If you need some earlier revision of the software, too bad. The couple of times that I've used TM to do a complete restore of the latest files, it's worked. It's also worked when I needed to get files long deleted or revised. A few months ago, I wanted to restore the complete file system of my 2012 Mini just before the upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan (so a restore from 2 years previous). The restored system wouldn't boot. I have software that will just update the system files just in case they got corrupted. That also didn't boot. The reason I needed the Yosemite files wasn't that important so I didn't look into it any further. I generally keep a TM and a clone backup for my Macs. By the way, I also had a clone of my Yosemite 2012 Mini but the partition on the drive failed.

If you have problems with the battery whereby the system doesn't have power when the computer is shut down, the clock will reset and if you don't or can't get an updated time from a Time Server (via the Internet) or if the time zone is incorrectly set, then that could cause issues for any type of software which does an incremental backup.

 

[Hoosmac]

Apple doesn't make public exactly what the diagnostic codes mean but sometimes there's specific information on the web on a specific code. Unfortunately that's not the case with your code. However, in the few posts from people who had the error code you had, they also seemed to have what seemed to be non-battery related issues so maybe the battery played a part in the issues you've having. If it's not too trouble, you might want to make an appointment at a Genius Bar at an Apple Store and see what they say about your error code and whether it could be related to the problems you've been having.

To check your battery health:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201585

This article is about battery cycle count, but it has information about how to get the Battery Information section in the System Information app and under "Health Information" if the "Condition" is anything but "Normal", you may want to consider a different battery.

I have taken it to a genius bar and the only error their scan shows is a battery code. This battery was purchased from Macsales and I am assuming from the reviews I've read other mac owners have no problem with these batteries
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Hoosmac --

You are now able to boot the MacBook and get TO THE FINDER using the internal drive, is this correct?

But... you are having trouble trying to restore from a Time Machine backup?

If so, your problems are almost certainly NOT "with the MacBook".

Instead, they are with the TM backup.

Can we establish these facts before we go further?

Guess I wasn't clear. A few weeks ago I could not do either a TM restore or OSX reload. The destination drive could not be found. But then for some inexplicable reason both worked(on the original samsung drive).So I did the TM restore and it worked but somewhat poorly;lot of beachballing. I formatted drive again and did clean OSX download and and then did high sierra upgrade it works much better.

 

[treekram]

I have taken it to a genius bar and the only error their scan shows is a battery code. This battery was purchased from Macsales and I am assuming from the reviews I've read other mac owners have no problem with these batteries

Did they give you an explanation of the error? My concern would be that the battery is acting erratically and that could have caused a hiccup in the system which would have caused corruption of data on the first SSD. On the Internet, you battery error code is not very common and several of those that did report that error code had unusual things that happened with their computer, though none which matched your situation. If it's not the battery, the next likely cause in my mind would be that something in the connection between the logic board and the SSD is not stable - this could be the cable but could also be the connector on the logic board as it is very small and I could see the individual connectors getting mis-aligned or something similar. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I can't say with a great deal of confidence that either of these are the problem but the other possibilities are even less likely in my opinion. Since it isn't that expensive, you can try connecting the SSD to the optical port and see if your problem recurs.

 

[Hoosmac]

The only explanation was that it was due to it being a non mac battery.The battery I had at that time I had purchased from Amazon. I returned that one and bought one from MacSales and had read comments that theirs seemed to work better than those from other sources.Your idea about a connector sounds plausible. Overall the mac seems to work fine. Now once this week the setting on the mac fan control had changed and it slowed down with high fan use and high cpu usage. I should probably post a seperate question about that matter.Thanks again for your help

 

[Hoosmac]

Did they give you an explanation of the error? My concern would be that the battery is acting erratically and that could have caused a hiccup in the system which would have caused corruption of data on the first SSD. On the Internet, you battery error code is not very common and several of those that did report that error code had unusual things that happened with their computer, though none which matched your situation. If it's not the battery, the next likely cause in my mind would be that something in the connection between the logic board and the SSD is not stable - this could be the cable but could also be the connector on the logic board as it is very small and I could see the individual connectors getting mis-aligned or something similar. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I can't say with a great deal of confidence that either of these are the problem but the other possibilities are even less likely in my opinion. Since it isn't that expensive, you can try connecting the SSD to the optical port and see if your problem recurs.

Want to thank you for your help. MBP seems to be working fine;I did switch out the original samsung ssd last week for the new crucial to see if that makes any difference. I have occasional "beachballing" which I'm willing to tolerate.May post a separate question about that.