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Hard drive not recognized

Toby Ziegler

Toby Ziegler

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 28, 2011
203
87
Gallifrey
Hey all...I've got a bit of a head scratcher, so I'm reaching out here and hopefully someone can offer some insight on my problem.

I recently upgraded my 2012 Macbook Pro to an SSD. My girlfriend was supposed to take my old 750GB hard drive for her own 13-inch 2012 MBP, which is where the problem comes in.

I cloned her original hard drive with Super Duper without issue, except it will not be recognized or boot from the internal HDD bay. It is, strangely enough, recognized and bootable over USB through my SATA/USB cable. The drive, which up til a week ago was working just fine in my own MBP, won't boot internally from the original machine either. I wiped and reckoned the drive again using Super Duper and once more through the recovery partition using OS X's disk utility to no avail.

If I look at the drive over USB, everything is there that should be there, but the computer won't recognize the drive if it's installed internally. FileVault was enabled for the first cloning, but I disabled it for the subsequent attempts. There's no firmware password on the MBP and as I said, it was readable by my own MBP right up until I removed it last week. Her original drive and my new SSD are both bootable from the internal bays in both machines, so I'm confident the drive cables aren't the issue.

I don't think it's possible, but I'm not discounting the idea the drive could've been damaged in the few days it was out and about before I got to cloning her drive, but it was sitting quietly in the box the SSD came in.

So, any ideas on how I can get this drive up and running? Let me know if there's any more information I can provide.
 
  • Like
Reactions: grahamperrin
If it's a bootable disk, holding Option while booting should bring up any bootable disks. If it's not there, I dare say it's not bootable.
 
First suggestion:
RE-CLONE the problem drive, but this time, use CarbonCopyCloner instead. Set it up to clone the recovery partition, as well.
CCC is FREE to download, and it's FREE to use for the first 30 days.
You can download it here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html

Does it work better after doing the above?


Second suggestion:
If you tinker and tinker and still can't get the drive recognized, I suggest you just put it into a USB3 external enclosure and be done with it. Let her use it as a backup and external storage drive.

Have the GF get a new SSD, and put THAT into the MacBook instead.

She'll like that much better.
And you, too!
 
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll try CarbonCopyCloner tonight and see what happens.

An SSD is in the cards for her eventually, but for now the storage bump was worth the upgrade for the time being. Thanks again and I'll post an update when it's done!
 
Fishrrman said:
First suggestion:
RE-CLONE the problem drive, but this time, use CarbonCopyCloner instead. Set it up to clone the recovery partition, as well.
CCC is FREE to download, and it's FREE to use for the first 30 days.
You can download it here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html

Does it work better after doing the above?
Click to expand...

Well, CCC ran and I installed the drive this morning...nothing. Once again, it's bootable over USB but not internally. I think at this point I'm writing the drive off as a lost cause.

Thanks again for your help!
 
JohnDS said:
Maybe a problem with your internal drive cable?
Click to expand...
I doubt it. The drive I'm swapping out used to be in my MBP worked just fine before I replaced it with an SSD. The machine it came out of won't recognize it anymore either. The perplexing thing for me is that it's seen over USB and boots into the OS from an external SATA/USB cable.
 
  • Like
Reactions: grahamperrin
Will that machine recognize other drives internally? Just not that one?
 
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