Problem installing Sierra on a new hard drive

[TitanTiger]

My brother in law has a MacBook Pro, mid 2012 model. He'd been having problems with it in that it would boot to the login screen, but then wouldn't finish booting. After putting in the password, it would go back to the grey Apple logo screen you seen at boot (but no progress bar or anything) and just sit there forever.

I took it home and made a backup of the drive and while doing that, found that both Carbon Copy Cloner and Disk Utility indicated the hard drive had some sort of physical problem. So he took the opportunity to get an SSD for the MacBook with the intention that we'd do a fresh Sierra install and manually move over photos, documents and such.

I have tried several times now to do this. I've tried a couple of times by installing the new drive, booting from a bootable USB installer thumb drive and initializing the new SSD and installing Sierra. It gets to about a minute left and hangs, even overnight.

So I tried running the installation on my Mac using the thumb drive as well. This time the installation worked, I set up the user account and booted up from the new SSD on my iMac. But when I moved the SSD back to the MacBook, it wouldn't boot. Gives me a no entry sign and a folder with a question mark.

So I recreated the bootable installer drive using Diskmaker X this time, erased the SSD and tried again on the MacBook Pro. Again, it hangs at about a minute left.

What am I missing here?

 

[keysofanxiety]

HDD SATA cable is faulty.

13" Mid 2012? Apple have a silent repair program for that model. Pop into any Apple Store and they'll replace the cable for you free of charge.

 

[TitanTiger]

HDD SATA cable is faulty.

13" Mid 2012? Apple have a silent repair program for that model. Pop into any Apple Store and they'll replace the cable for you free of charge.

Interesting. So it's not an official recall but they will do it for free?

Do you have to go to an Apple store (company owned) or will a third party Apple Authorized Service Center do it too?

 

[keysofanxiety]

Interesting. So it's not an official recall but they will do it for free?

Do you have to go to an Apple store (company owned) or will a third party Apple Authorized Service Center do it too?

Correct, not official repair program in that it's advertised on Apple's website, but it's definitely a repair program. They'll sort it for free.

Either Apple Store or AASP can sort it. As it's a repair program you won't get charged for labour.

 

[TitanTiger]

Out of curiosity, did this problem persist with the Late 2013 models? I've been looking at some of those on eBay and if that's an issue I'd like to be prepared, or possibly go a different direction.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"Do you have to go to an Apple store (company owned) or will a third party Apple Authorized Service Center do it too?"

Take it to a brick-n-mortar APPLE STORE (NOT to a third party provider).

There is a "silent recall" on the internal drive ribbon cable.

Chances are they will replace it free of charge and give everything else a look-over as well.

You've been advised what to do...
I suggest you do it this way!

 

[DeltaMac]

Out of curiosity, did this problem persist with the Late 2013 models? I've been looking at some of those on eBay and if that's an issue I'd like to be prepared, or possibly go a different direction.

No, MBPro models newer than mid-2012 all use flash storage, which plugs directly into the logic board slot, no cable for that.

 

[TitanTiger]

The local Mac retailer (Simply Mac) was aware of the silent recall and will replace it free of charge. They are an Apple Authorized Service Center and Retailer. The nearest Apple Store is 2 hours away so I'm gonna let these guys do it. They have a pretty good reputation here in town (your mileage may vary).

 

[TitanTiger]

Success! They replaced the cable while I waited, ran some diagnostics on it to make sure there weren't any other issues and now the MBP is running like a champ. Thanks so much for the help!

 

[TitanTiger]

A separate question: The new drive is a Crucial MX300 525GB SSD. I'm on Sierra 10.12.4.

There seems to be some disagreement on whether you should enable TRIM or not. Crucial seems to have some built in garbage collection in the firmware but it requires the computer being idle for a certain length of time to allow it to do its thing.

Should I or should I not enable TRIM for this computer?

 

[DeltaMac]

There is probably not a firm answer on the "trim" question these days.
There's opinions, but TRIM is less and less necessary as the SSD firmware mostly covers that need for maintenance with garbage collection. The more recent SSDs continue to improve performance, and TRIM is not always the "great wonder" that it was a few years ago.
But, likely hurts nothing to enable trim anyway.
Reminds me of a (possible) quote from Yoda:

If TRIM you want, then enable you must.

 

[Weaselboy]

Should I or should I not enable TRIM for this computer?

There really is no downside to enabling TRIM. I would enable it.