You can reformat the drive, repair & check its status without relying on the internal HD. I highly recommend you make a bootable installer with a USB drive (or a partition of an external storage device formatted as macOS Extended) - it's much more reliable. I kept the backplate off, and I tried to plug in the SATA connector to the internal hard drive while it was on the ⌥ Option boot drive selector.Ī white spark came out and it immediately shut itself down - New SATA cable and an SSD solved it. I discovered this by disconnecting the hard drive, and using a bootable installer containing macOS High Sierra (10.13.6). ![]() The SATA cable in my MacBook Pro 7,1 (13 inch, Mid 2010) failed too. I haven’t taken it to Catalina yet though. My 2011 MBP was bought for a song and is still happily zipping along with 8GB of RAM. When replacing the part, I would recommend you also place a strip of electrical or kapton tape between the ribbon and the aluminum top case to help protect it. In my observations, the friction over time can expose and short the micro traces in the ribbon against the aluminum top case, causing intermittent drive errors and boot / install problems.Īn early sign of the failure can be a lower than expected negotiated SATA link speed (i.e 1.5Gbps on a 6G bus). Movement is expected due to the rubber mounts on the HDD, so it’s a bit of shortcoming in the design. The ribbon appears to become damaged over time by grit building up between the flex ribbon and the chassis / top case, which rubs against the ribbon. ![]() It may not be the case for your MacBook Pro, but I have personally repaired quite a few 20 13” MBPs with intermittent boot problems by replacing the HDD SATA / IR Sensor cable. Thanks I’m glad my lengthy post was useful for somebody.
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