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Reinstall through Internet Recovery

Dear All,



I am trying to replace a failed hard disk in a Macbook Pro (2011 or 2012).

I have purchased a brand new Crucial 256 GB SSD. I switch on the Macbook and press "alt" key to go through the internet recovery. So after the WiFi connection and downloading the Image (high sierra) I get the 4-option menu (photo attached).


From now it is a nightmare for almost a week. No matter what options I try it ends in failure. I cant Erase the new disk because I get error. So I Erase/format in another Mac successfully and deploy to the Macbook Pro and initiate Internet recovery and click"reinstall macOS". The newly Erased SSD is visible and I click it and almost immediately I get "Permission denied" error. (photo attached).


If I try to Erase it through the Disk Utilities I get error (photo attached). So I have to always Erase in another Mac and then put the disk back in to the Macbook Pro. So far all attempts to reinstall the operating system on to the new disk have failed.


I have now run out of options.


Please advise!!

Many thanks,

Bina


Posted on May 16, 2019 11:02 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 16, 2019 9:36 PM

Looking back at my earlier post, I forgot to mention that you can eliminate the internal hard drive cable as the issue by removing the SSD and connecting it externally using a USB to SATA Adapter, dock, or enclosure.


I also just noticed you were erasing the volume and not the physical drive. In Disk Utility just above the left pane, click on the "View" drop down list and select "Show All Devices". The physical drive should appear in the left pane of Disk Utility. Select the physical drive and erase it.


Good luck.

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6 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 16, 2019 9:36 PM in response to BinaHejazi

Looking back at my earlier post, I forgot to mention that you can eliminate the internal hard drive cable as the issue by removing the SSD and connecting it externally using a USB to SATA Adapter, dock, or enclosure.


I also just noticed you were erasing the volume and not the physical drive. In Disk Utility just above the left pane, click on the "View" drop down list and select "Show All Devices". The physical drive should appear in the left pane of Disk Utility. Select the physical drive and erase it.


Good luck.

May 16, 2019 6:00 PM in response to BinaHejazi

rcosta887's suggestion is a very good idea to try. If it doesn't work, I would suggest performing an ATA Secure Erase on the SSD which will reset it to factory defaults just in case it got into some weird state that rcosta887's suggestion won't work. I have had to zero out a USB stick several times because Disk Utility could not partition/format it correctly otherwise. To perform an ATA Secure Erase, download the free version of Parted Magic from this link here and create a bootable USB drive using Etcher. Option Boot the Parted Magic USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". There should be an erase option on the Parted Magic desktop. Make sure to select the "ATA Secure Erase" option and not the other slower option to "zero" the drive. The ATA Secure Erase is a hardware feature built into most SSDs and will take 30-60 seconds when activated.


It is possible you have a bad hard drive cable which is very common in these laptops especially when upgrading to an SSD.


Also try an SMC reset and PRAM reset (hold the PRAM reset for at least three chimes).

May 16, 2019 11:22 AM in response to BinaHejazi

What I would try is to actually repartition it (on your desired MacBook Pro if possible, otherwise on the other Mac which seems to work better with it) and change its partition type temporarily to a Windows MBR (Master Boot Record) partition. Then go ahead change its partition type to the (required for Mac) GUID partition type.


By doing this it will flush out the boot table sector on the hard drive without needing to use any low-level commands and there's a good 50% chance this will work to get you back on track.

May 16, 2019 8:42 PM in response to rcosta887

Many thanks for your reply.

I carried out your suggestion to the letter and the Disk Utility failed to correctly Erase/format the SSD drive and gave exactly the same error message as before. Basically I have never successfully formatted any of the many drives including the new SSD through the Disk Utility as part of the downloaded image with Internet Recovery option. However in the other (Virtual) Mac it is quite the reverse.


Any idea?


I am now going to try HWTech suggestion.

May 17, 2019 5:07 AM in response to HWTech

Hi HWTech,

many thanks, after a week of absolute frustration your advise DID it!

I connected the HDD externally through USB cable and had no problems using the DU. However once I tried installing the error message was "You may not install to this volume because the computer is missing a firmware partition". Could this be a BIOS update issue?

So having successfully Erased (Mac formatted) the disk I replaced it back internally and initiated the Internet Recovery and the disk was visible to install to!!

Its been going on for 20 mins and has 45 more to complete.

Thanks ever so much for your continuous help on this matter, I am ever so grateful to you mate!!!!

Regards,

Bina

May 17, 2019 6:54 AM in response to BinaHejazi

I would suggest replacing the hard drive cable in the laptop. While the OS may install I expect you will begin to have problems once you start booting directly to the SSD since you will be reading & writing to the SSD at the same time unlike the install process where you are mainly writing to the SSD.


The "missing firmware" issue is due to Apple being stupid. Mojave requires a hidden EFI partition to exist on the internal drive or Mojave won't install. The hidden EFI partition is a boot partition containing a boot loader and it is also used to store a firmware update so it can be applied on the next reboot. I have no idea why the hidden EFI partition on an external drive cannot be used, but Apple has decided to make life difficult for us. I wish their error message would be more explicit like "macOS requires the internal drive to contain a hidden EFI partition to hold required firmware updates even when installing macOS to an external drive". One way around it is to install your old drive (or any Mac formatted drive) internally until after the macOS install completes.

Reinstall through Internet Recovery

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