Restored drive to new drive, flashing folder with ?

[Cybiker]

2014 Mac Mini running Mojave. Purchased a 128gb SSD pulled from a similar model that came with one (mine did not). Installed SSD and booted to existing OS and verified SSD - all is good. Rebooted into recovery and utilized disk utility to restore my HDD to my SSD. Success. Rebooted machine and came up to flashing folder with "?"

I was ACMT a few years ago so I remember a few tricks but i'm currently stuck. Rebooted machine to recovery again and this time it went to network recovery. Both drives unmounted. Attempted to choose startup disk but neither show as options.

Tried to do a reinstall of Mac OS from network recovery and it wants to install Yosemite.

Hopefully this is just due to some strange boot conflict and easily resolved.
No time machine backup - HTPC with everything stored on external drives - No real need for backup but would prefer not to have to install and configure all of my software again.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

 

[velocityg4]

Is the old drive the original boot drive? If so just hold down the option key when booting and select it as the startup disk. Once booted use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your old drive to your new drive.

 

[Cybiker]

Is the old drive the original boot drive? If so just hold down the option key when booting and select it as the startup disk. Once booted use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your old drive to your new drive.

Old drive is original boot drive. Holding option key only allows me to connect to wireless network (odd as it has Ethernet plugged in). And gives only internet recovery option.
[doublepost=1546461950][/doublepost]

Is the old drive the original boot drive? If so just hold down the option key when booting and select it as the startup disk. Once booted use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your old drive to your new drive.

https://imgur.com/a/wkWJu3Y
Is what I see when hopping into Disk utility via internet recovery. Tried clicking on the partitions to mount them and no go.

 

[velocityg4]

Old drive is original boot drive. Holding option key only allows me to connect to wireless network (odd as it has Ethernet plugged in). And gives only internet recovery option.
[doublepost=1546461950][/doublepost]
https://imgur.com/a/wkWJu3Y
Is what I see when hopping into Disk utility via internet recovery. Tried clicking on the partitions to mount them and no go.

Just in case you don't know. Any startup key must be pressed before the chime. When you press the power button. Immediately depress any startup key or key combo. Keep holding until you see a disk menu, OS starting to load or other response.

Try holding Option-Command-R this should have Internet Recovery boot to the latest Mac OS X available for your Mac. This only works on Macs which had macOS 10.12.4 or later installed at some point.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904#notupdated

Try a PRAM reset (Option-Command-P-R). It probably won't fix anything. I just want to be sure your keyboard is being recognized before the startup chime. You'll hear the startup chime then it resets and you'll hear a second startup chime. Release the keys after the second chime. If the keyboard is not responding and it is a bluetooth keyboard you will temporarily need a USB keyboard.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063

Disk Utility: May be good or bad. If the disks were formatted in APFS. Yosemite can't read APFS volumes. If they were still HFS+ then the file system may be corrupt. You'll be able to format and clean install the SSD. But getting access to your old data may be tricky.

If none of the above works. I'd suggest unplugging the USB HDD. Letting Internet Recovery do a clean install of Yosemite onto the SSD. Then upgrade to Mojave. It'll be less time consuming then trying to fix things. Then you can worry about trying to repair the HDD and migrating data. Hopefully you have a backup drive so you can skip trying to repair the HDD.

 

[Fishrrman]

My suggestion:

You still have the OLD drive that will boot inside, is this correct?
And the NEW SSD is there, as well?

Then.... do this:
1. Boot from the OLD drive
2. Open Disk Utility and ERASE the SSD.
3. Download CarbonCopyCloner from:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html
CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days -- doing this will cost you nothing
4. Open CCC. Put the source drive (OLD drive) on the left. Put the target (SSD) to the right.
5. Accept all of CCC's defaults and click the clone button. It may take some time.
6. When done, power down, ALL THE WAY OFF
7. Press the power on button and IMMEDIATELY hold down the option key and KEEP HOLDING IT DOWN until the startup manager appears
8. Do you see the SSD as a potential startup volume?
9. If so, select it with the pointer and hit return
10. Do you get a good boot?
11. If so, open the startup disk pref pane and designate it to be the boot drive.
12. To test, again power OFF and reboot.