Chosen Solution
Hi, I have a Macbook Pro which I’d like to repair for a family member of mine. The Macbook has had an upgrade to a Samsung 850 Evo SSD a year ago and ran just fine. It crashed and the entire SSD is erased. No big deal, but I’d like to reinstall the OS but it doesn’t seem to work. Trying to format the SSD with command + R goes to internet recovery with no menu, after this small bar is full it loads up a slightly larger bar and then gives me a white screen. The hardware diagnostics ran just fine with the extended test giving no problems. Is it completely dead?
One of the major failures on the model is the hard drive/IR cable. I would replace it with the improved one from the 2012 model: MacBook Pro 15" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable Also, was there ever an attempt to install High Sierra on this machine? This can cause APFS formatting issues on the hard drive. UPDATE To verify that the cable is the problem, get a USB to SATA adapter, remove the drive and hook it up externally and boot. How to use a Hard Drive Adapter
