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Hey, I bought a good condition MacBook Pro 2012 for 100$ to get into fixing and modification. The problem with the MacBook according to the seller is that the MacBook is booting but stuck on the loading screen forever. from what it seems, I think it’s a problem with the old hard drive so therefore I’m gonna upgrade to an SSD and adding more ram. I have thought about this combination: SSD- https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N5I… RAM- https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00SNS… cable- https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S9C… My plan is to connect the new hard drive to my 2015 MacBook for format and updates, and then to connect it to the 2012 MacBook pro. my questions are:

  1. I have no idea what was the last os on the MacBook so I don’t know if the MacBook 2012 would read the new SSD without an update to a newer os, can I try to install the new os directly on the new SSD? 2)do I need to create a bootable installer? And again that’s a personal project so I’m trying to make it budget as possible Thank you in advance!

You don’t really need the SATA to USB cable if you are going to setup and use a USB thumb drive as a bootable OS installer, which is what I would do. But you likely need a new HD SATA cable! As your symptoms are telling me you could also have a bad cable as well. Your Hard Drive Cable Is A Ticking Time Bomb. Placing a strip of electricians tape down on the uppercase where the cable crosses is important. So I would also get a new HD SATA cable as part of my upgrade process MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable Make sure you get the latest version if you get it from other sources. Here’s the guide to put it in MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Mid 2012 Hard Drive Cable Replacement. Even still your efforts in putting it in could also damage it! You don’t want to fold the cable (crease it) as that will damage the thin foil wires within it. Instead use an old BIC pen ink straw to help in forming a nice arc where the cable needs to be bent. As for the OS this system can run: Mojave is the last supported macOS, but I don’t recommend it! Instead I would stay with Sierra! The issue is the limitations of the SATA connection and Apples new file system. APFS is a very chatty protocol so it can overwhelm the SATA connection as the buffers are limited to two in each direction, unlike PCIe/NVMe which has four per direction per lane! (x2 =16, x4 =32, per direction). So stick with Sierra macOS 10.12.x! How to get old versions of macOS Follow this guide to create a bootable OS installer How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive. Just make sure the USB thumb drive is formatted with GUID Journaled file system.