Chosen Solution
Hi, good morning ! Couple days ago, I bought a UNITEK DOCKING STATION (Hard Drive Cloner) and a NEW 1TB SSD (SAMSUNG 850 EVO). The reason I’ve bought these is with the intention to Make an exact Clone of my current drive of my MacBook Pro 17” (Mid 2010), to the new SSD. PROCESS: When I followed the process indicated by the manual that comes with the Docking Statation, > step by step <, and it finished (showing the 100%) as the manual indicates when the process was done, I took the cloned SSD 1TB from the Docking Sation and I have now installed it into my MacBook Pro 17” (Mid. 2010) and it won’t boot up. Notes: •• I’ve turned on the computer and it shows a Folder and a Question Mark in the Middle shows up. •• When I connect the SSD HARD DRIVE on other computer externally, using Disk Utilities the drive shows pp and you can see it has an actvie partition with Data from the Hard Drive which served for initial Clonning Purpose.
I have done this process like for 5 Times already ( Formating it and Clonning it Again) I am talking about the » ( SSD ) « and it doesn’t work. I feel so frustrated and I need this be able to work because I have to install my NEW SSD into my laptop. Please somebody let me know what the issueis and what could help me to resolver it. I WILL APPRCIATE ANY PROMPT RESPONSES.
Put your HD back into your system. You’ll need to create a bootable OS installer drive (USB Thumb Drive). Follow this guide: How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive. I recommend sticking with Sierra Vs going to High Sierra. Using it to boot up reinstall the OS. Generally, I don’t like cloning with modern OS’s as there is much more involved with bootable drives. I prefer using the OS’s own tools which are designed to work with their OS. Here I would have used the Migration Assitant app after first installing a fresh copy of the OS onto the drive. That way all of the user properties and settings would be preserved. If you do an OS install the installer even asked you at the end if you have to copy over anything. Cloners also don’t add in newer things like here the recovery partition. Bottomline: I would scratch the drive back down and then run the OS installer and then migrate your stuff back over (which will be an exact copy of what you have on your HDD). The only benefit of the docking station was its ability to connect the new drive.
I don’t understand why cloning an HDD to an SSD does not workin this senario. Something about block by block cloning vs sector by sector cloning? Shouldn’t a cloned drive be identical to the OS either way? I have this exact same problem and it’s infuriating. On top of that, there is an unknown firmware password set on this MacBook, so I cannot use the recovery to re-install Mac OS so my only option is to make a bootable USB I guess.
