Hi all! Haven't posted here before but figured this would be the best place to start with my current SSD-related drama.
I was getting fed up of only having 128GB of space on my Early 2015 13-inch Macbook Pro, so after a bit of looking around I went for a 480GB Transcend JetDrive 825 - though having read this thread I see now that might not have been the best idea!
However after I performed a Time Machine backup, opened up the laptop to swap the SSDs and booted back up into recovery, I ran into a problem that I've not been able to fix. I can't see the drive listed anywhere, either in Disk Utility or by running "diskutil list". I double checked the drive by taking it out and putting it into the provided Thunderbolt enclosure and macOS could see it with no problem, but after putting it back into the M.2 slot again Disk Utility couldn't see it.
Some other things I've tried:
- Cloning the existing SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner - the drive still isn't seen by the Macbook, so I get a folder with a question mark
- Formatting the drive as both APFS and HFS+ - neither of these seem to work
- Installing an older version of macOS onto the Jetdrive - tried this with both Yosemite and High Sierra, both could not be seen
- Installing macOS on an external drive, booting to the external drive and cloning onto the JetDrive in the M.2 slot - suggested by Transcend's support, OS booted fine on the external drive but still couldn't see the JetDrive in disk utility
- I also used a bootable Linux USB to see if the drive could be seen, but again it doesn't show up at all
My suspicions are that there's something missing in the way of firmware that's stopping the drive from being seen in the M.2 slot, but doesn't affect it in the Thunderbolt enclosure. However macOS was fully up to date already, and there was no newer firmware available for the JetDrive.
Sorry for the long post, I'm reaching the edges of my ability/temper with this and now I don't really have a usable Macbook, so I would be very grateful if anyone had any other insight ideas! Thanks in advance!