Chosen Solution
hi i bought a 1tb hard drive for my mac 1tb Western Digital 5400rpm 2.5 7mm but it doesnt get recognized by the mac, i swap it again to the old hard drive and works fine, its not the flex cable i was wondering if theres some sort of compatibility with some hard drives
Actually I found that YouTube video it’s showed me it was the motherboard I don’t have the video right now but explain it very well my issue
A standard hard disk drive usually doesn’t have any compatibility issue, however it needs to be formatted to be recognized by the Mac as it usually comes with a Windows compatible FAT or NTFS file system. You’ll have to start your Mac in recovery mode unless you have a bootable pendrive installer: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904
While you may be one of the lucky few who genuinely doesn’t have a bad HD cable, but for many of these it’s typically the cable - I’d guess 9 out of 10 fix it with a new cable. Since it’s so unbelievably common, I’d start there to rule it out. For most of these, it’s beyond the point of being a question - original cable and they probably put a modern drive that it wasn’t designed to take in the system. The problem is unless you’ve tried, there’s no way to be 100% sure your cable isn’t bad. Anyone who knows better professionally doesn’t trust the cable with the system unless the customer indicates it’s been done and may require it to be done with a drive upgrade service. The details on how to patch the machine and change the cable can be found within this answer to the same issue: Will Crucial MX500 2TB 3D CT2000MX500SSD1 SSD work in my Mid-2012 MBP?
