MacBook’s SSD Cable
The story began when I came to spend a few months in the north and my Mac didn’t turn on. Got the following screen:
My initial thought was that the OS Partition from my MBP (Mac Book Pro) was simply corrupted, but then it turned out the SSD itself had died, and is still dead. Tried using external connector through USB and nothing.
Luckily, I had another SSD I had from a Windows 10 Desktop. Guess what? I plugged it in and Windows 10 booted up perfectly well and things worked just like that, out of the box, no special settings. I only got one blue screen of death along the way, pretty good for a random SSD exchange from a desktop running Windows 10 for several years
Well, I’m of the opinion that each hardware has the best OS/Software for it, Windows isn’t that for a MBP, even an aged one. It did run fast in any case.
I moved on to partition it in APFS and install latest MacOS compatible with my MBP (Catalina), unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned.
The partitioning kept failing while either trying to partition, format or mount.
I went on and got myself a live linux on an usb drive and proceeded to check the ssd. First I had to format it as ext4, which went well and nothing bad happened. Ran bad blocks and again nothing, completely fine.
Went back to Disk Util while in MacOS Restore and still had the same issues. Tried to format as Free space and it worked just fine, flawless. Tried to format as exFat and also, just fine. APFS? would fail at any point from beginning to end.
Then I realised that this was a curse and nothing else. A witch or a neighbour had placed a curse on my equipment or on me and the curse was strong, since even after strong curse removal techniques, animal sacrifice and the such the APFS process kept failing. I even thought about giving the computer to someone I don’t like and the curse would be passed to that person but then my saner mind prevailed and I went to google to look for the technical reason behind it.
I do know I had switched drives a few times but no more than 5 times and as such I would assume that this is a fragile cable, hair thin and not very flexible.
My Brazilian reasoning came to me and I proceeded to install a folded piece of paper covered with electrical tape between the cable and the MBP back plate/cover to make pressure over the cable and maybe force it to perform correctly. After one attempt the process completed well and I was able to install MacOS Catalina.
Conclusion:
On MBPs, there is a real possibility that partitioning and data issues are directly related to the SATA Cable connecting the Mother Board and the HDD/SSD. From my research on google it’s so common that repair technicians will replace it right in the beginning of the process instead of tinkering with it further.
Thank you for reading this far, did you? This is my first public post on Medium and I will try to explore ways to move forward, maybe introductory guides for diverse programming languages: JavaScript, Go, Python, Java, PHP and so on(I had my good moments with several at varying degrees of good and length).