[SOLVED] MacBook Pro Mid 2009 won't boot, detect USB and can't reinstall OS on new SSD

[TrevorIJones]

Good morning,

I’m hoping someone can help me. I have a MacBook Pro Mid 2009, it’s no longer booting properly from the existing hard drive and just gets stuck at the loading screen and eventually reboots in a loop. Ive tried all sorts of things to repair it, as well as replacing the Hard drive with a Crucial MX500 SSD but nothing is working properly.

I suspect the current disk is failing, I can boot it into recovery mode but have only been able to run first aid on the disk once which failed. I’ve also gone in through safe mode to run the various verify and fsck-fy commands which are failing – so I think it’s a bad disk

Carried out PRAM & SMC Resets which have made no difference

I have replaced the hard drive with the SSD which at first wasn’t detected until I formatted it. Then I used TransMac with an El Capitan image, restored the image to a USB drive in an attempt to boot into recovery mode and install using the new image onto the new SSD, which fails to work.

Firstly, it won’t boot into recovery mode, I’m guessing it’s because there is no recovery mode available as it was on the old HDD and this older Mac has no internet recovery option. When I use the ‘Option’ key at boot to select a boot device it only detects the blank SSD, it doesn’t detect the USB. In fact, it doesn’t detect any external drive I've used with TransMac or a DVD with El Capitan on. The only USB drive it detects is a Transcend external USB which was used for time machine backups but as I can’t get into recovery mode with the new SSD I can’t restore it. When I've tried restore from time machine backup with the old hard drive in, no backups are detected. I’m not sure why it only picks up the Transcend drive…

I’ve tried to get into hardware diagnostics mode using ‘D’ but that doesn’t work
I’m really at a loss with what to try next, if I can’t get the MacBook the install media I can’t think of a way to reinstall on the new SSD.

Bit of background info, I don’t have a spare Mac or Apple device, Only a Windows 10 computer. Any help would be much appreciated!!

Kind regards

Trevor

 

[mattyjoe]

I have this exact MacBook Pro model which I put an SSD in just recently. I could never get El Capitan to install properly, and I tried every single workaround I could find online. It just wouldn’t install. So I have mine running on Yosemite. My first suggestion would be to get a USB boot drive with Yosemite setup, wipe the internal drive, and install Yosemite on it. It sounds like this could solve all of your problems, if El Capitan is just not cooperating.

This will be hard to do without an alternate Mac to do it with; do you know anyone whose Mac you could use?

I would also avoid doing anything more with the original hard drive from the MacBook. It is probably failing, and files on it could be corrupted now. Don’t try to restore anything from it, try to get a clean install of Yosemite on the SSD, and restore whatever data you need from the Time Machine backup.