Daughter's MB Air early 2015.
SSD was screwed.
Ran for a time booting catalina from USB - this works fine but "sleeping" is dodgy and anyway it was time to fix it properly.
I've installed a new internal NVME SSD. After booting from USB stick (Catalina) the new disk can be seen and I've used SuperDuper (I don't have CCC) to clone the USB:Catalina to the new internal SSD - that seems to work fine but I can't boot from it even though SuperDuper is set to make it bootable.
When the system boots (from USB) it mounts the internal drive as nobrowse (so the finder does not see it but disk utility does).
If I boot from Recovery (without the USB stick plugged in) and try to re-install it offers me to recover El. Capitan - which is of course well before APFS. How can I get past this and boot from the internal SSD without starting with El. Capitan and working forwards (which may not be possible anyway because the installers won't be there). ALso, the disk-utilities in Recovery cannot see the internal SSD anyway. That suggests to me that there is something in firmware needed to access APFS which is not present.
If I can get past this I'll update it to Monterey eventually (It *will* run it) but for now, Catalina would be fine as I use several other macs running Catalina which cannot be upgraded without OpenCore Legacy Patcher. So how can I boot Catalina on the internal. I suspect its something related to firmware which I know nothing about.
When I boot Catalina from the USB there is an update available which includes firmware. Its something to try but I don't right now have a backup of the USB stick and I don't know what updating the firmware will do when I have booted from USB - will it work properly ?
Please advise the best way forwards.
Thanks
andy
SSD was screwed.
Ran for a time booting catalina from USB - this works fine but "sleeping" is dodgy and anyway it was time to fix it properly.
I've installed a new internal NVME SSD. After booting from USB stick (Catalina) the new disk can be seen and I've used SuperDuper (I don't have CCC) to clone the USB:Catalina to the new internal SSD - that seems to work fine but I can't boot from it even though SuperDuper is set to make it bootable.
When the system boots (from USB) it mounts the internal drive as nobrowse (so the finder does not see it but disk utility does).
If I boot from Recovery (without the USB stick plugged in) and try to re-install it offers me to recover El. Capitan - which is of course well before APFS. How can I get past this and boot from the internal SSD without starting with El. Capitan and working forwards (which may not be possible anyway because the installers won't be there). ALso, the disk-utilities in Recovery cannot see the internal SSD anyway. That suggests to me that there is something in firmware needed to access APFS which is not present.
If I can get past this I'll update it to Monterey eventually (It *will* run it) but for now, Catalina would be fine as I use several other macs running Catalina which cannot be upgraded without OpenCore Legacy Patcher. So how can I boot Catalina on the internal. I suspect its something related to firmware which I know nothing about.
When I boot Catalina from the USB there is an update available which includes firmware. Its something to try but I don't right now have a backup of the USB stick and I don't know what updating the firmware will do when I have booted from USB - will it work properly ?
Please advise the best way forwards.
Thanks
andy
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