Apple MacBook Pro SSD replacement
My daughter's dependable Apple MacBook Pro laptop would not boot and hence, I started this research. She has one of the older MacBook Pro laptop (2015 version) which we had purchased in 2016 so it definitely is a very reliable machine.
During the inital video call from her dorm she showed me that once she switches on the laptop it ends up on a flashing folder with a question mark icon and would not boot. The screen also displayed a link to Apple's support site so we tried that first in order to come up with next steps.
As we did not have any backups, the first option was out. We didn't want to try reinstalling the OS yet, as that was our last option. The "Get Help Online" option - browsed it through but its very generic and then finally tried Disk Utility. The only disk I could see here was "disk image". As this was my first encounter with an Apple machine, I didn't realize what this was. We tried running the "First Aid" option which checks for disk errors on this "disk image" volume. That came back clean. I thought this was the main SSD but later realized that this is some other disk on the machine which stores the OS image which is used for reinstall. I should have realized it here that the local disk is not accessible at this point which means the SSD had failed, but as we had no clue what we were doing, we decided to generate a bootable USB to see if we could boot via that option. I was using my Windows knowledge to fix a Mac.
In the meantime I drove to my daughter's college and gave her my old Windows laptop (which weighs at least a ton) so at least she could use it till we find a solution for her Mac. She also found out that the college proivides loaner Mac laptops to students which I thought was pretty cool. We needed a working Mac to generate a bootable USB. Her roomate had one, I told her to either buy a new USB stick from Walmart (close by) or we could drive up and drop one off. The roomate had to head home for the weekend, but my daughter was able to secure a loaner from the college. So we decided to use this loaner to generate the bootable.
After rummaging through the various styled USB sticks in the house found two working ones, one 16GB and another 30GB. Then I found out that the loaner laptop from the college was so new that it did not even have a USB-A port. It came with a USB-C connector and I did not have any adapters to convert USB-A to C. So, our complete plans came to dead halt.
While I was searching through various online blogs and posts to find a solution to boot the laptop, I ran into a video on youtube which showed how to prepare a USB bootable for Mac on a Windows 10 or 11 machine. Kudos to all those folks who have already done this research!
I had to download some trail software like TransMac, Paragon Partition Manager 17CE, HFS+ for Windows and then tried the instructions from the first video but it did not help.Then watched another video and combined the steps between the two. I was finally able to generate a USB bootable drive for Mac on Windows. I ended by creating the bootable with Sierra 10.12 OS.
I tried booting with this USB drive and it seemed promising at first. It did show the Sierra OS startup screen
but ended up on the same OS X Utilities menu that I had seen before. Disk Utility now showed two drives, this USB and the disk image volume. It still did not dawn on me that the SSD had crashed and wasn't accessible. So now I tried the OS install option and the only disk available was the USB. I thought it would use the information from the USB and load it to the SSD. This was the first time I found out that the laptop was running El Capitan 10.11 OS. Obviously the install failed as there wasn't enough space on the USB drive for it. Error message wasn't helpful.
Then for some reason I thought the I should use El Capitan on the USB bootable. Also, I switched from the 16GB drive to 30GB USB drive. I followed all the steps from the two youtube videos and created the El Capitan OS bootable USB drive. Tried that and same result as before. The computer would start, end up at the OS X Utilities menu, I would select OS install, it would try to install on the USB drive and evetually error out.
At this point it dawned on me that the SSD had crashed and wasn't even viewable under disk utility. My daughter did not care that her data was lost. So, I started researching how to replace the SSD. Even if I did manage to replace the SSD I wasn't sure at this point what it would take to re-install the OS on the new SSD.
I shutdown the laptop and flipped it and, removed the 10 screws. The two at the top of the above image are shorter in length. Rest of the screws are of the same size. They use a star shape screwdriver.
I used the T5 bit from the trusted screwdriver set. Once the back cover was off, the laptop had to be taken to the cleaners!
It was filthy dusty and both my daughter and wife helped in brushing the dust off.
The SSD in the top right croner of the above image. I used the T6 star bit to unscrew the screw on the left side of the SSD and then slowly tiltled it up and pulled it out of the connector.
I ordered new SSD from Amazon and was happy that it would be delivered in a day. After receiving the SSD early next day, I installed it. It looked like everything was finally coming together.
At this point I realized that bootable USB drive was not really required for this issue. Apple has this awesome architecture where it stores the OS image in a separate disk on the computer which can be used to perform a complete OS reinstall. I am not aware of something similar in the Windows world.
So back in disk utility, I can see the new internal SSD, my external USB bootable and the disk image.
Selected the OS reinstall option and now I can see the internal SSD plus my USB bootable which I had left plugged in. Again, bootable USB not really required.
It went through a few things but finally displayed the same dreaded error message that OS could not be installed. I am like, now what?
So after reviewing a few more videos on youtube found out that as part of the re-install, the process uses the wifi or internet connection to connect to Apple's software repo and download the latest software. El Capitan being so old has an expiration date set and hence the install fails. So the simple trick was to turn off wifi or the internet connection, change the date to the year 2015 (when El Capitan was valid) and then continue with the install. Steps are available in youtube videos.
Finally we saw the above screen, and the install was a success! As part of stepping through this wizard re-enabled the wifi, which eventually did sync up the date. Next we decided to upgrade the OS as close to the latest version as possible using the software update method.
So from El Capitan 10.11 first upgraded to Catalina 10.15 and then to Monterey 12. This is as far as we can go on this laptop. All installs and upgrades worked like a charm.
Lastly enabled Time Machine backup to my local NAS drives and now we have a baseline backup too.
My daughter is very happy, not because she has a worlking laptop but because the Minecraft game which had stopped working on the old OS is now working. Kids, I tell ya!
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