SSD Not Booting

[Ambrosia7177]

Hey y'all. Welcome to my soap opera thread!

I have a MacBook Pro from maybe 2012 with a 1 TB HDD.

My hard drive cable *literally* melted in the Texas heat last summer and corrupted my internal HDD.

Fortunately after a week of screwing around, I was able to recover 95% of my data, and manually put it onto another 1TB HDD. Then I was forced to start using a two month old clone, as my OS got wiped from the damaged drive.

In August, I bought a new MacBook Pro in the Summer of 2016 with a SSD, and because of a lot of life issues, including a dying father, I have yet to use my new laptop.

Here is where the problem comes in...

I have been using my old MBP with the old clone I started using. So now my data is fragmented across two drives and a real data recovery issue if I ever get my new MBP going.

The clone I have been working off on my old MBP now has a clicking HDD hed and I am afraid I will lose my data again.

When I bought my new MBP in August 2016, I also bought an external case and Evo 850 1 TB SSD for quicker backup.

I used CCC to clone my entire external/working HDD on my old Mac on Thurdsay. When I went to Option boot up from it yesterday - and I created a Recover Partion in CCC - I don't get a drive to choose to boot from.

Is my new 850 Evo not compitable with Mountain Lion on this old MBP???

I am freaking out, because I don't have another 1TB HDD to back up my failing clone - which could go at any moment - and I can't get my damn Evo 850 to work as a bootable clone of this failing drive.

WTF?!

Please help me get this all working!!!

BTW, it appears that CCC did clone my data onto the Evo 850 external drive, it's just that I have no way to boot to it, which would still be a major issue should my old 1 TB HDD die this weekend.

 

[Weaselboy]

I used CCC to clone my entire external/working HDD on my old Mac on Thurdsay. When I went to Option boot up from it yesterday - and I created a Recover Partion in CCC - I don't get a drive to choose to boot from.

I'm a little confused. So the clicking drive is in an external enclosure and you cloned that to the SSD also in an enclosure? That should work and be bootable even without a recovery partition.

That SSD should work fine under ML.

Sorry about your father.

 

[Fishrrman]

Sorry to hear about your dad.

But.. your "computer world" is -a mess-, which has been easy to detect from your postings here in recent months.

Here's what I'd do:

Put the SSD into the MacBook Pro, along with a new SATA ribbon cable.
VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION:
Do you have a brick-n-mortar Apple store anywhere close?
The SATA cable is a known defect and there is a good chance they will replace it FREE OF CHARGE. So GO GET IT DONE.
Bring your Samsung SSD along. They might also be persuaded to put the SSD inside, but that's not "a given". DO ask about this.
While you're there, you might also ask if they'd install a good copy of the OS onto the drive. Not sure if they'll do that.

DO THE ABOVE FIRST.

Then...
Get a working copy of the OS onto the SSD.
IF you can't get the OS installed at the Apple store, try "internet recovery".
Power the computer down, all the way off.
Boot up and IMMEDIATELY hold down the Command+Option+R keys together.
It's probably going to ask for the password to get onto your wireless network, be ready for that.

If you get to the OS utilities, it's successfully booted.
Next, choose to install whatever OS it gives you the option of installing.

When that's done, can you get booted and get to the finder?

These are "the first steps" to getting the MacBook healthy again.

One other tip:
In Texas, never NEVER NEVER leave the laptop in a parked car for very long!

 

[Ambrosia7177]

I'm a little confused. So the clicking drive is in an external enclosure and you cloned that to the SSD also in an enclosure? That should work and be bootable even without a recovery partition.

Correct. My internal HDD cable died this summer, and it corrupted my original internal HDD. Specifically, it killer the part of the internal HDD where the OS and apps were.

Fortunately, I was able to recover 95% of my data and store that on another drive.

I had a HDD clone that was two months old, so I just started using that, knowing that I was without two months of newer data which was safely resting on a temporary HDD.

Fast forward to today.

I am over 1,000 miles from home now.

I have been using my outdated clone as my new primary HDD via an external enclosure.

I plugged in a 2nd external enclosure, but this time with an Evo850 in it.

I logged in under my admin account on Thursday, and created a Recovery HDD on the Evo and then cloned my entire external HDD onto the Evo.

It appears the clone worked, BUT when I reboot holding Option, I all I see is the dropdown for where you choose Internet. I see no icons come up for my Evo drive.

I got hope from work last night and frantically tried this again, and same issue a second time. CCC runs to completion, I look in Finder and it appears my data was cloned, but if I try and boot up from my external enclosure with the Evo850, I don't have anyway to choose it.

Sorry if I sound incoherent, but I am upset (and worried) and this whole thing gets more and more complicated.

(How screwed up is it that you are living off an emergency close as your primary HDD and then it starts failing and you can't back it up to a new external SSD??)

Sorry about your father.

Thank you.

Alzheimer's is an ugly disease...

 

[Weaselboy]

Okay gotcha... you don't really need recovery on the SSD for it to work, and I'm wondering if something you are doing there is messing it up.

So option key boot to the old drive then just use CCC to clone it to the SSD without doing anything to recovery and see if that works.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

Okay gotcha... you don't really need recovery on the SSD for it to work, and I'm wondering if something you are doing there is messing it up.

So option key boot to the old drive then just use CCC to clone it to the SSD without doing anything to recovery and see if that works.

My old Mac has two accounts... A regular user and an admin user.

All of my data is under the regular user.

When I run CCC, should I be logged in as the admin or does it not matter?

(I know that to create the Recovery Partition, CCC requires me to be logged in as admin)

 

[Weaselboy]

When I run CCC, should I be logged in as the admin or does it not matter?

As I recall it does not matter because when you install CCC it makes you authenticate as an admin, so the app can access everything.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

As I recall it does not matter because when you install CCC it makes you authenticate as an admin, so the app can access everything.

This just gets more strange as I go...

The problem started earlier this week when I would be using my Mac for a few hours, and then all of a sudden I got the "rainbow wheel of death" and the green light on my external HDD would be all green meaning it wasn't reading and writing.

I have always thought the USB ports on my Mac were sloppy, so I crimped the USB cable on my external drive to make it tighter. After a reboot I would be fine for a few hours, and then this happened again. During this I would randomly hear a loud clicking from my external HDD, although usually only once or twice when it would lock up or after a reboot.

Before I went to be last night I was 3/4 the way done cloning and I got up to go to the bathroom, and my Mac screen was solid block, but I could see the mouse pointer and move it? Strange!

Had to reboot, and of course that trashed my cloning again. (It took me 16 hours to clone my harddrive the other day - which is why all of this happened starting back this summer. I never had enough hours in the day to clone my MacBook Pro!)

Fortunately I found the USB hub I bought down in Dallas before leaving the state this summer. I have both external drives plugged into it now thinking maybe this is a USB port or USB power issue?

This morning I did a partial clone of just my admin account with no data, and when I option boot, I do see the Evo SSD drive now?

Maybe my clone and recover partition got screwed up when my HDD locked up during the clone on Thursday and Friday?

I now have a clone of my admin user and am cloning essential data files on my regular user as we speak while logged in as my regular user.

 

[Weaselboy]

Maybe my clone and recover partition got screwed up when my HDD locked up during the clone on Thursday and Friday?

What I'm thinking is going on is that bad hard drive is incapable of allowing all the data (system files and such) from being copied over since it is failing. It does not sound like you are doing anything wrong.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

The plot thickens...

Here is what I have found out over the last three days...

1.) My old HDD seems to skip/fail/lockup when run over long periods of time. So when I tried to use CCC to clone my entire drive, it would often fail overnight thus killing the backup.

2.) Then I tried to just clone certain folders at a time. However when I would try cloning the second folder, the first one disappeared. Turns out I didn't know CCC as well as I thought, and needed to uncheck the "Remove files on the destination that I have excluded from the backup" so it wasn't a destructive incremental clone.

3.) The Inateck external enclosure that someone on here recommended sucks, because it doesn't work on my old MacBook Pro!! I tried my old metal external case, and with just the main USB cable it powers up fine. Truth be told, I think my original clone was okay, but the reason I didn't see it come up when I rebooted was because apparently this case only uses the newer USB format and requires more juice to power than my old 2012 MBP can provide.


After pissing away an entire weekend, and risking having my old HDD die before I could clone it to my new SSD, I was finally able to get everything sorted out and am now typing from my old aluminum enclosure with my newly cloned SSD that is now my new primary HDD.

Looks like I better get my new Retina set and start using that one!!

Thanks!