WD Blue SSD stuck in a boot loop

bootcatalinaexternal-diskhard drivessd

Stuck in a bootloop with ssd

So I recently pruchased a WD Blue 500GB SSD to replace my HDD in my 13" MBP mid-2012.
At first I wanted to clone my HDD to the SSD, looked up a tutorial on ifixit and then followed the procedure. I used superduper to clone it, but whenever I began cloning it kept asking me to convert the deive to APFS, and superduper failed to do so by itself. My SSD was in an Orico disk drive enclosure.
I formatted the drive manually through disk utility to APFS.
Started the cloning process took approx 16 hours. Then I tried to boot through the ssd while it was in the enclosure however it kept bootlooping, so I figured I should try installing it first, did so and the same thing kept happening. Finally I reinstalled the OS(catalina) through recovery and, the bootloop is still persisting.
Right now I am just back to using my HDD, and it has begun to exhibit the same problem. It goes to the progress bar on startup and abruptly reboots.

Things I have tried,

  • PRAM and SMC
  • Erasing and doing a fresh install of macOS on SSD
  • Put the SSD in the Disk ecnlosure and try to boot from there
  • Putting the HDD in the enclosure and boot it from there(which works but is extremely slow and I still don't know what to do afterwards)

Any suggestions?

Best Answer

A boot loop is not necessarily an issue with the drive and it’s your last sentence that lends credence to this:

Right now I am just back to using my HDD, and it has begun to exhibit the same problem. It goes to the progress bar on startup and abruptly reboots.

A boot loop is when, during the boot process, something loads that causes a system crash that forces a reboot.

  • Corrupted macOS installation
  • Corrupted partition maps
  • failing hard drive
  • logic board issue
  • GPU issue
  • and more

However, your last bullet point offers a bit of hope that it may be your SATA cable (common problem with this vintage MacBook Pro)

Putting the HDD in the enclosure and boot it from there(which works but is extremely slow and I still don't know what to do afterwards)

This means that the operating system and things being loaded isn’t crashing the system. What you’ve taken out of the equation is the everything between your drive and your logic board (the same drive works via USB) which is the SATA cable.

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