Chosen Solution
I’ve had my 2012 13” macbook pro for 5 years, used it for 4 and only recently fired it back up so I can give it to a friend. I backed up the files I wanted to keep, and went into the recovery mode utilities screen to see if I can try to fully erase the data. I went through with the disk erase and ticked the box for the secure erase that does it 7 times (or something like that) and waited ~8 hours for it to finish. After it finished, it didn’t boot normally and got stuck at the apple logo and loading circle underneath. Somewhere along the line it didn’t recognize the drive on starting up and I got to the menu to choose the drive and it returned to showing the apple logo instead of the folder+question mark. Sorry about the vagueness of that, but I can’t recall this part as well. Went back into recovery mode, did all the repair/verify for the drives on the list, did my first re-install of the OS (was showing yosemite at first). Still didn’t go anywhere past the apple logo screen, waited an hour and decided to restart and go through with the OS reinstall again. This time it showed up with Snow Leopard instead of yosemite, and I continued thinking it might help fix the startup issue. I thought to let it update the OS and go through with some of the startup loading on the apple logo screen while I slept for a bit. 6-7 hours later and it was still on the apple logo screen. I’m sure I’m not going about this correctly, but I’ve just been trying to clean this up and follow along with partial help from guides online. There’s a separate thread on iFixit that mentions a bad HD SATA cable, but I’m not getting the folder icon with a question mark screen so I’m not sure if that’s the issue. I’m able to access the internet in recovery mode, but I’m not able to boot it in safe mode. It was all working decently before I tried cleaning up and reinstalling, but I wanted to try and take care of this weird screen flicker that would happen when I tried to use apps since I’m not gonna give anyone a laptop that’d do that. If these other details are useful in figuring out what is up, the battery does say it needs replacing and I plan on looking into that soon. However, the battery life hasn’t impacted my use of the laptop prior or when I returned to it. As far as I know, I haven’t dropped my laptop at any point owning and using it. Any and all help or input would be appreciated.
I would start with the HD SATA cable as it’s the cheaper to replace, otherwise the drive is likely gone.
