MP 6,1 Mac Pro 2013 - SSD help

[Mijaur01]

I was preparing my Mac Pro 2013 for sale. I have the original Apple SSD and I successfully set that one up for sale so this isn't an end-of-the-world situation. I had upgraded the SSD in the Mac Pro to a Samsung 970 Evo (which has worked flawlessly for over a year). I erased the SSD and then went to clean load OS X when the computer presented me with a black screen with a folder and a question mark. I went into recovery mode and disk utility is only showing OS X Base System 1.3 GB (this is a 1TB drive.) I've done a lot to try and locate the full drive including booting off of an external drive. Using the external drive, the OS starts up but disk utility doesn't see the 1TB SSD drive at all. I'm overly cautious, and I double-checked the format I should use when I erased the drive but I'm guessing that I used the wrong format which is why I'm only seeing the Base System partition on the SSD. Is there a good way to reformat the entire drive? Since this is a blade SSD I don't have an external dongle I can use to plug it into another system. Thank you in advance for any assistance!

 

[tsialex]

Boot Internet Recovery without any external drives connected to your Mac Pro, just the internal blade.

After macOS installer is loaded, go to the Menu and open the Terminal.app, after it opens run diskutil list, it should show the 970 EVO as disk0, something somewhat like this:

/dev/disk0 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                                                   *960.2 GB   disk0

If you can't get something like the above, your NVMe blade is not being detected. If shows something like that, take a picture and post here, let's start from it.

 

[Mijaur01]

Thanks TSIALEX, I'm only seeing the 1.3 GB Apple_partition_scheme. I'm not seeing the 970 EVO.

 

[tsialex]

Right, your 970EVO is not being detected at all, maybe the 12+16 adapter is not correctly connected?

 

[Mijaur01]

I just re-seated the SSD, starting it up again with a boot disk, I will check disk utility and terminal in OS X.

 

[Mijaur01]

Still not showing anything. That 1.3 GB Apple_partition_scheme must be on the SSD, right? I don't see that anywhere else.

 

[tsialex]

Still not showing anything. That 1.3 GB Apple_partition_scheme must be on the SSD, right? I don't see that anywhere else.

Nope, it's a RAMDISK created to download and temporarily store/run the Internet Recovery (OS X Base System).

 

[Mijaur01]

Interesting... my next thought was to grab a NVMe USB adapter to see if it shows up on another computer (my new Mac or my Windows PC). Would that be your next step?

 

[tsialex]

Interesting... my next thought was to grab a NVMe USB adapter to see if it shows up on another computer (my new Mac or my Windows PC). Would that be your next step?

I would test the 970EVO with a M.2 to PCIe card or a real M.2 slot, here I would install the blade to my MacPro5,1 or to my Ryzen PC. I'd also install my original Apple blade back to the late-2013 Mac Pro, to be sure that the slot still works.

If you already have a USB to M.2 adapter, try it.