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Hi So I purchased a MacBook Pro retina 13” 2015 from eBay with no ssd. I purchased a new ssd and an adapter however it’s caused me nothing but issues. the mac won’t recognise the drive internally and only recognised it when I plugged it in using an external enclosure. I then Installed the original Mac OS available from the recovery menu onto the SSD however when I try and install any other Mac OS such as High Sierra or big sur either from a bootable usb or via the App Store on the Mac it tells me it can’t be installed because the drive is missing a firmware update. So as a quit rundown I’ve tried the following virtual machineBootable usbInternet recoveryFormatting the drive via disk utilityPartitioning the drive via disk utilityTried multiple ssd adapters Does anyone have anything else I could try?
Ouch! You have an infinity loop issue! You need a real Apple SSD in your system so you can upgrade the systems firmware to which is part of Mojave or newer. Then once thats done you can switch out the SSD with a larger unit (I really recommend going with either an Apple or OWC SSD) M.2 SSD have issues! I’ve pulled out quite a few out of many Mac’s either because the adapter failed or the SSD became corrupted as the extra data lines Apple has in their connector deal with sleep and house cleaning activities like wear leveling which the adapter and M.2 SSD have no clue what to do or the lines to even access them. So sure the M.2 SSD will work like a cheap pair of sneakers but they just don’t hold up very long, more so if you are a marathon runner! Here’s a helpful reference The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs I would stick to one of these: Apple SSD’sTranscend JetDrive 850 SSD’sOWC SSD’s
Hey Cameron, Very sorry to hear about this. Firstly, have you gone online and checked anything about firmware for the SSD in questionNextly, can i clarify what particular SSD this is?Then, try putting it in either another mac or a windows machine, format it, wipe it and put it back in the mac in question. If need be i can try and test with my own 2015 13" mbp as i do indeed have one and come back with a few results (But i don’t want to risk it unless it is a must for this but I’d be happy to if necessary). Wish you well on your journey to finding a solution to this issue
