Installing macOS on broken Macbook Pro

Sapphire_AMP · October 8, 2019

Hey guys,

so I had an endevour over the last days. I came across a MPB early 2015 with a broken SSD. Only recovery on the SSD with Sierra was functioning. I wasnt able to reinstall the OS, drive is somehow dead. Installing High Sierra on an external HDD was complicated enough, I had to use dosdudes installer, because I always had the blinking question mark when I tried to boot from external HDD using recovery mode. From there with dosdude Mojave Patcher I was then able to upgrade to Mojave 10.14.6.

Now I ordered a sintech adapter and Crucial P1 NVMe to swap the dead internal SSD, while using a bootable USB Stick with Mojave to install macOS on the new NVMe. Drive is showing up perfectly, I can erase it and set it up as APFS. But installing OS/booting is not working, doesnt matter how I try to setup the new drive. Timemachine, cloning, restoring with diskutility...nothing.

My bootloader is old (MPB121) because I think the dosdude patcher for the initial HDD does not update it? Or because I only updated to HighSierra on the erxternal and this does not affect the MPB? Or because my Mojave Version is too old? I know that Dosdude has a Bootrom injector for nvme, but Mojave should support this natively...

Btw, tried three nvmes to test the sintec adapter/bad nvmes...

thankful for any advice!

HrutkayMods · October 12, 2019

Try installing an older version of OS X then upgrading. Try installing El Capitan then going to High Sierra then going to Mojave... it sounds like a very convoluted headache but that will probably enable the firmware upgrade it sounds like it hasn’t been flashed for APFS booting properly yet.

btw I’m friends with Collin Mistr aka dosdude1 and I can safely say that the patcher will not flash your system you have to do it with an official installer