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I bought a Samsung SSD 840EVO drive to upgrade, but the laptop doesn’t detect the drive. I tried a second drive that I bought for my second laptop thinking it may have been a faulty drive but this drive also doesn’t show up.
A new internal drive normally ships unformatted. Unless the operating system on the old boot drive posts a dialog box offering to format the unrecognized drive, the computer doesn’t “detect” anything because there isn’t anything the operating system can speak to yet. Of course, if the way you installed this SSD was to remove the previous internal HD and install the SSD in its place, without formatting the new SSD and installing a bootable operating system first, then there’s no operating system or formatting utility at all. What steps have you already taken? If you can give us a detailed list of the things you’ve already done, in order, it will be easier to determine where the problem is. A common technique to replace an internal boot HD with an SSD would be to: attach the SSD as an external drive first through USB/FireWire/ Thunderboltuse Disk Utility to format the SSDclone the operating system+user data from the internal HD to the external SSD using Disk Utility, SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner (you can also do a clean operating system install by downloading an installer from the App Store and installing it on the new drive)then open up the computer and swap the drives That way, once you restart the reassembled computer, you can at least be sure that there’s a drive with a bootable operating system available. If you’re following the technique I’ve outlined, it’s wise to try booting from the new external SSD before installing it internally, just to make sure the computer recognizes the drive as bootable.
To answer the question “laptop does not detect the drive” as follows: Also bought a Crucial 525 SSD drive and yes my mac did not recognize the drive in Finder nor in disc utilities. I studied the advise and did not get a good answer why the drive is not detected. Not being scared of computers by now, I again tried to format the drive in disk utilities and saw the view button in the left hand top corner and when opened it revealed “show only volumes” which is the standard configuration and “show all devices” which I then selected and problem solved. The disk was detected and I could format it. Hope the info will help. Gurupvd
I just installed a Samsung 860 EVO in my mid-2009 MacBook Pro, as a replacement to the HD that crashed. Initially, I thought that the unformatted drive would show up as an option for OS X install and that the install process would take care of it, so I directly replaced the internal HD with the SSD. The SSD did not show as an option for installation. Searched for a solution and found this thread, I did not need to remove the SSD and format it while connected as an external drive; from the install screen I selected Disk Utilities, formatted the drive, quit disk utilities and proceed with the install screen and the drive showed as an option. Thanks for the help.
I have a similar problem trying to install a Samsung EVO 850 SSD in my Macbook Pro early 2011. The guys at the apple store told me to install the new drive, hold down cmd R to go into recovery mode, then install a new OS on the drive. However when I got to that point it didnt’t recognize the SSD. So I used disk utility to erase the SSD, then it recognized the drive & it let me download Mountain Lion from the internet which seemed to go well. Then I tried to restore from Time Machine which also went well. However, when it was done it wouldn’t recognize my password. I tried restarting & now it get the Apple symbol & the spinning wheel. I also have an iMac. Should I try formatting the SSD as an external drive as described above? Thanks for your help!
The disk is probably using the new Apple File System (APFS) file system. The disk is format in APFS. Your older Mac only supports the “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” format. So your older Mac will never be able to read the files on drive, even if detects the drive itself. For comparison Windows has exFAT, MS-DOS (FAT), Fat32, NTFS file system. Solution: Find a friend who has a new Mac OS. Connect the drive using usb cable and copy all files to his HD for a while. Take your drive back to your system. Format it using whatever option you have in your OS, most likely Mac journaled. Dont use Journaled encrypt, its slows the system. Then go to your friend with another HD external and bring your files back. You’ll need an external usb drive to accomplish all that. .
I got a brand new Samsung SSD for my MB Pro. I can actually format it in Linux, but not in MacOS. I‘ve read on the Net that getting a new SATA cable might help (There’s presently a sale on them…). What do you think?
Hi guys. I recently bought a SSD 840 EVO to replace my previous seagate SSD. After loading it on disc utility, when I select the Samsung drive it does not allow me to click on partition or mount. It also does not show when I try to reinstall OS. I do not have any external cable so and need this drive to work ASAP. I have interviews to prepare for :( Please help! Thanks in advance, Jonathan
Use a Windows 10 install DVD or USB and format blank hard drive though the setup. Cancel the Windows 10 setup when files load. Reboot Mac and format through Drive utility. Install MacOS or restore from TimeMachine. Can also be done with Linux install disc. Just need to format the drive for Drive utility to see the drive.
What do you do if the partition tool is unable to be used in Disk Utility? I see it as an option but it does not allow me to click it.
I have a different issue - my Samsung SSD was detected via external SATA/USB plus. It allowed me to format it, even install fresh OS, but as soon as I swapped it with my old HDD on my early 2011 Mac, the only drive recognizable by system was a Recovery drive. Mac does not detect my SSD via internatl SATA connection. My HDD works ok, so I assume it’s not a case of SATA cable. I reformatted it again, without installing anything via exteral plug, then tried again, and this time my mac did not detect any drives at all, not even Recovery. Any hint on why it’s not detectable?
SOLVED : Samsung EVO 850 SSD SATA III working in Optical Drive now. MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011) - 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7. I have SSD as main drive and a HDD in “Optical Drive”, But it was taking too much battery/ too much noise. I put a new Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SATA III SSD in optical drive. For some reason it was not showing anything!!! After reading some post , I realized that my caddy is not SATA III compatible. So I clicked on the link provided https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004FM… It looked exactly like my previous caddy but something inside, a chip or something is new. Make sure seller is “HIGHFINE”. NOTE : After installing new Caddy in optical drive with SSD Sata III, I started computer and was able to see SSD in DISK UTILITY. I initialized/ formatted it. BUT drive was showing in some weird small size. I restarted Laptop and it came on FINE.
I recently installed two new SSD’s into my MacBook Pro 2011, one in place of my HDD and a second in place of my optical drive, when I booted up the computer the first one showed up but the optical drive SSD did not show up. Also my bootable drive for OS X El Capitan isn’t allowing me to install it so I took out the new SSD and put my old HDD back. Any answers as to why my second SSD isn’t showing up upon booting up the computer? Pretty sure I installed it correctly, also I’m having a lot of trouble creating a working High Sierra bootable USB drive. Every time I try to download a copy of HS from the App Store it doesn’t download the full 6gb+ installer but only the like 20mb one. I need help please!
I now reinstall macOS from scratch. The Mac model is a MacBook Pro Late 2015. When I get into the installer using Internal Recovery, my disk doesn’t show up in Disk Utility. I also tried to find it from “diskutil” list but it didn’t show up there too. I know the disk is okay because it’s a new one and when I boot into a live Linux instance, it’s okay. Does anyone know a way to fix this issue?
I used CMD-Option-R to boot into recovery mode, instead of just CMD-R. This resolved seeing my new ssd and reinstalling the os.
you can go to utilities and disk manager on the installation and format is as journald then holla
A friend gave me an SSD SAMSUNG EVO 860 , formatted with os x (higher than mine,maybe sierra ) and a lot of files. I have mb pro 2009 os x 10.11 and the disk can’t detected . I see it at Disk Utility with usb cable , as a second disk with disk tray but nowhere else and without access. I don’t want to format it because i ‘ll loose the files . So, I need your help to get the files.
