I have a 2013 MacBook Air with a busted SSD (13″, 8GB, 25g SSD). The SSD is completely gone. Both Apple Recovery and bootable Linux recovery tools still see the drive, but they display it as a “0”. It can’t be erased or formatted let alone made bootable.
Modern replacement SSDs require that High Sierra or higher be installed on the machine because of a firmware update that’s needed to work with these new SSDs. The original OS on the machine (Mountain Lion) was never updated because the machine was used with Windows and Linux rather than Mac OS.
Therefore, I first need to update the machine to High Sierra using an external drive to get the firmware update for a new internal SSD drive.
I’ve connected an external SSD drive via USB and used Internet Recovery to install Mountain Lion on that.
This external SSD drive appears as “Buffalo SSD-PGU3/NL Media”, and the partition for the Mac OS is called “Recovery”.
From Mountain Lion, I’ve updated my way to Sierra. That’s the last OS I’ve been able to install. I cannot install High Sierra because of a firmware error that appears when I run the installer. It says: “You may not install to this volume because the computer is missing a firmware partition.”
What do I do here?
A few other things I’ve noticed:
- In the App Store, ever since installing Mountain Lion on the external drive (or possibly since updating to El Capitan), I have an entry for “MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 2.8 “. I have run this numerous times, but it keeps reappearing.
- In Disk Utility, via the Erase option, I get no option to change the file system to APFS.
- When I run Recovery, using Disk Utility and then “First Aid” on the partition “Recovery”, among the list of tasks performed by the utility appears a line saying “Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required. Operation successful.” This line has reappeared every time I’ve run Recovery again.
- I’ve tried re-installing Sierra via Recovery a couple of times just for the heck of it, but this has failed every time. At the end of the update preparation, I keep getting an error message asking me to run the utility again.
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
