My boss was cleaning out his old computer junk from his house during a move. He had 4 Macbooks that he was disposing of... a white one, a couple if A1286 Macbook Pro, and a A1398 Macbook Pro from Early 2013 I think. Based on the EMC 2673 designation on the back, I think it is a 3rd gen i7 of some variant. 256GB SSD and an unknown amount of RAM (probably 8GB). It has a couple dings on an edge, but the screen and everything else is flawless. Boss man gave me the lot.
I spent probably way more time last night than I should have trying to get this thing going. It boots up with a "?" file folder, which means it cannot see the system drive. I then started up with Cmd R and went into Restoration mode. Wireless works, RAM and processor obviously work. Mouse and keyboard are working. Disk utility wont format, erase, or otherwise work with the SSD that is installed. I tried anything and everything I could think of... going through terminal with diskutil, fdisk, and gpt commands. Made recovery USB for Mojave, and tried those same steps again to no avail. The best debugging messages I got were about partition map being invalid and something about EFI. I made an image of my Macbook Pro and tried to restore to his (mine is a tick older, but still should have worked). I tried one of my Time Machine backups to no avail. I even went so far as to use a Windows 10 install USB stick to use its disk formatting and management tools - hell I even tried to install Windows 10 on it. Nothing could alter the makeup of this SSD.
I read a lot about bad ribbons, but I am assuming those are issues for older models that still had spinning platter hard drives. Being as the SSD in this thing is more like a m.2 (but not m.2), I would think the worst case scenario is that, when boss man dropped it that one time, he jarred it loose. Seeing as it is held by a screw, I am doubting that.
So I THINK I am at the point where I want to try a difference SSD. Its the only thing left to try... or is it? Anyone have any other suggestions that I may have missed? I ordered a OWC 512GB drive and a toolkit, so hopefully that arrives tomorrow and I can get this thing up and running.
I spent probably way more time last night than I should have trying to get this thing going. It boots up with a "?" file folder, which means it cannot see the system drive. I then started up with Cmd R and went into Restoration mode. Wireless works, RAM and processor obviously work. Mouse and keyboard are working. Disk utility wont format, erase, or otherwise work with the SSD that is installed. I tried anything and everything I could think of... going through terminal with diskutil, fdisk, and gpt commands. Made recovery USB for Mojave, and tried those same steps again to no avail. The best debugging messages I got were about partition map being invalid and something about EFI. I made an image of my Macbook Pro and tried to restore to his (mine is a tick older, but still should have worked). I tried one of my Time Machine backups to no avail. I even went so far as to use a Windows 10 install USB stick to use its disk formatting and management tools - hell I even tried to install Windows 10 on it. Nothing could alter the makeup of this SSD.
I read a lot about bad ribbons, but I am assuming those are issues for older models that still had spinning platter hard drives. Being as the SSD in this thing is more like a m.2 (but not m.2), I would think the worst case scenario is that, when boss man dropped it that one time, he jarred it loose. Seeing as it is held by a screw, I am doubting that.
So I THINK I am at the point where I want to try a difference SSD. Its the only thing left to try... or is it? Anyone have any other suggestions that I may have missed? I ordered a OWC 512GB drive and a toolkit, so hopefully that arrives tomorrow and I can get this thing up and running.
