Chosen Solution
Hello , I bought a 2014 15” MacBook Pro without its SSD. When I boot up with recovery mode it boots up in Maverick OS, and it doesn’t recognize my NVMe SSD which is inside the system. I have tried using an external SSD with Catalina in it, I have later transferred and formatted the NVMe SSD (Internal) and the Mac recognized it but when I boot up it gives me a “question mark” and when I reboot to recovery mode , Maverick OS will not recognize it. I made a bootable USB and still when I download the OS to the internal NVMe SSD it will start in loops and will never boot up to the OS , and it keeps giving me this annoying 5101F if I tried the other recovery mode method. I reset the NVRAM and the SMC and still same problem , it doesnt boot up . The SSD is seen and I can install stuff in it but with an external drive ONLY. The macbook isn’t able to boot up from it and I am really !#^&@@ trying all day with it Do you have any info to fix this issue ??
I think you are hitting a few different issues here. Lets start off with the flashing question mark: Thats the reaction you get when the drive is not either a bootable OS as well as not set as the boot drive. So assuming it is properly setup as a bootable drive you then need to set the systems firmware to use it. So restart your system and press the Option (⌥) key to enter into the Startup Manager so you can select the internal drive as your boot drive. Once the system is up and running go into your Preferences > Startup Disk and now set the drive as your boot drive. At that point you should be set! Reference: Mac startup key combinations But the drive is not visible in the Startup Manager! That tells us its not properly setup and will need to re-install the OS. Your systems firmware may also not be updated with the newer firmware to support APFS file system so if you setup Catalina on it it won’t work. To add to this the SSD you are using is not a real Apple unit as such the NVMe driver is not present in Mavericks release you need Mojave to gain access to it. You are using a very old OS here (Mavericks)! Your system can support newer OS’s. I would get to macOS Mojave 10.14.x its the last one which supports 32bit apps. Go to this Apple T/N to gain access to the OS installer files How to get old versions of macOS. Don’t use anything you already have as you likely have an expired installer, here’s more on that If you’ve got an old macOS install image, it will probably stop working today Follow this guide to create the needed USB thumb drive installer How to create a bootable macOS Mojave installer drive I still find using the installer drive is better than using the internet recovery or hidden partition recovery. Between taking much longer to run if you have a disruption it may fail the install. The other factor is I like completely wiping the drive down so the recovery partition is rebuilt with the OS I’m installing so you don’t get into future install problems.
