Resolved Macbook Pro late 2012 Mojave(?) rendered unusable

[literallyDeadFromMojave]

Downloaded Mojava a couple weeks ago cause I thought the dark motif and dynamic desktop would be cool. Things were fine the first night, until I noticed my sound wasn't working. Hmm. No big deal, found the answer in some daemon for Boom2 I had to delete from some folder somewhere. Problem solved!

Then... I subconsciously notieced boot time was getting longer. Started noticing the beach ball when clicking between apps. Odd since in the five years and one month I have owned this computer this has never happened. Still though, apps and browsers worked.

Now, it has progressed from being a laggy nuisance but usable to full blown terminal Mojave. I cannot use my computer for anything. I mean I can technically, if I click on something, walk away for 45 minutes, then come back and click the next thing. I thought it might be the hard drive so I swapped it out (850 evo to 860 evo). The entire process of copying, from installing superduper and then cloning (not including physical hardware installation) took just over 4 hours. Threw in a new battery even though I didn't need one. No dice. It is not the hard drive. Restarted the Vram (or whatever) by holding ctrl+option+p+r. Nothing. Rebooted the thing where you hold ctrl+option+shift+power button for 15 seconds. Interestinly, when I did that it booted up to the user screen at a normal speed, I had high hopes for a second. Then I clicked my user name to sign in and bam! Wheel of death again. Hopes dashed, illusions shattered. I tried to get in to the startup programs to turn them off or remove onces I don't need. Every attempt to get into system preferences times out and fails. I attempted twice to boot in safe mode but I do not have the stamina to hold the shift key down for an hour or longer while it boots. Perhaps tomorrow I will strategically place a can of chili atop a magic marker and try again.

I am thinking my only option now is to pray I can spend the next day and a half slowly time machining what documents I've got and then reformat from AFPS (sp?) back to the other format and reinstall High Sierra.

I come very close to just buying another macbook tonight. I can't wait five months for the update that fixes this. High Sierra was just fine but nooooooo, I HAD to update so I could have the same OS my xcode tutorial was using. What a smart guy I am! Now look at me. Posting from a $120 ideapad. And I HATE windows.

Pathetic.

 

[b183]

SATA cable is bad replace and no beach ball

 

[literallyDeadFromMojave]

SATA cable is bad replace and no beach ball

let me ask you something. is the SATA cable the same cable as the one that originanlly came with the HDD hard drive? because that cable failed a bunch of times but it was a very easy fix each time. However the failure always happened the same way, it just crashed and then i got the grey boot folder. There was none of this laggy business. i was under the impression that the solid state had a different cable. or type of cable.

Anyway i hope that's it since that would be the last piece of hardware i'm aware of that i could try swapping out.

 

[literallyDeadFromMojave]

After reviewing some posts here on this forum I suppose I should have added that I checked activity monitor and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I also ran etrecheck a few days ago before it became functionally unusable and etrecheck also said a bunch of stuff that didn't seem important, with the main idea being everything seemed fine but maybe there were some files that should be deleted. I would go back and pull the logs to post here but... you know.

I've come to the conclusion I am going to replace the hard drive cable and see what happens since despite almost unanimous agreement that the cable is more or less binary in ragards to working or not, there have been sporadic comments noting that it may be possible some of the cable could get worn away by rubbing against the metal and lost data that way. So, I will attempt to spend $15 more before scrapping the whole thing. Also I will post results once the cable arrives, I am planning on rushing the shipment for tomorrow since I have no life and want to have my laptop for the weekend.
[doublepost=1541823779][/doublepost]I have ordered the cable and it will be here fo pickup at amazon on Sunday afternoon. I hope I can eat my words and it is the cable and not Mojava. Time will tell. More on this later.

 

[stevenaaus]

Yeah... some of the Pros seem to mess up the sata cable somehow. It could be your problem... faulty cables are definitely not always "binary. A simple test is to move the HD to an external drive and boot it this way. It will be slower of course (and may need to initially check the HD for errors), but faster than a failing sata cable.

 

[literallyDeadFromMojave]

Yeah... some of the Pros seem to mess up the sata cable somehow. It could be your problem... faulty cables are definitely not always "binary. A simple test is to move the HD to an external drive and boot it this way. It will be slower of course (and may need to initially check the HD for errors), but faster than a failing sata cable.

It was the cable... le sigh. Sorry I didn't respond earlier. I honsetly have had the cable sitting in thebubble wrap package for a week blowing it off because I didn't expect it to work and I dreaded the thought of plunking 1,500 for another macbook. But I just got around to it a minute ago and it solved the problem. So I am HAPPY to eat my words, it was NOT mojave. It was the dumb SATA cable........ for the 6th time.

literallyDeadFromSataCable checking out.

Peace out y'all

 

[Riwam]

It was the cable... le sigh. Sorry I didn't respond earlier. I honsetly have had the cable sitting in thebubble wrap package for a week blowing it off because I didn't expect it to work and I dreaded the thought of plunking 1,500 for another macbook. But I just got around to it a minute ago and it solved the problem. So I am HAPPY to eat my words, it was NOT mojave. It was the dumb SATA cable........ for the 6th time.

literallyDeadFromSataCable checking out.

Peace out y'all

Would be nice if you put before the title of your thread the customary "RESOLVED" for all the readers.
Ed

 

[literallyDeadFromMojave]

Would be nice if you put before the title of your thread the customary "RESOLVED" for all the readers.
Ed

Sorry, new to the forum. Done.

 

[Soca]

Might this SATA cable be the culprit for a MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012? Or was my cable bulletproof and the new bad cable came out later that year? Thanks.