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Stuck in a bootloop with ssd

So I recently pruchased a WD Blue 500GB SSD to replace my HDD in my 13" MBP mid-2012. At first I wanted to clone my HDD to the SSD, looked up a tutorial on ifixit and then followed the procedure. I used superduper to clone it, but whenever I began cloning it kept asking me to convert the deive to APFS, and superduper failed to do so by itself. My SSD was in an Orico disk drive enclosure. I formatted the drive manually through disk utility to APFS. Started the cloning process took approx 16 hours. Then I tried to boot through the ssd while it was in the enclosure however it kept bootlooping, so I figured I should try installing it first, did so and the same thing kept happening. Finally I reinstalled the OS(catalina) through recovery and, the bootloop is still persisting. Right now I am just back to using my HDD, and it has begun to exhibit the same problem. It goes to the progress bar on startup and abruptly reboots.

Things I have tried,

  • PRAM and SMC
  • Erasing and doing a fresh install of macOS on SSD
  • Put the SSD in the Disk ecnlosure and try to boot from there
  • Putting the HDD in the enclosure and boot it from there(which works but is extremely slow and I still don't know what to do afterwards)

Any suggestions?

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A boot loop is not necessarily an issue with the drive and it’s your last sentence that lends credence to this:

Right now I am just back to using my HDD, and it has begun to exhibit the same problem. It goes to the progress bar on startup and abruptly reboots.

A boot loop is when, during the boot process, something loads that causes a system crash that forces a reboot.

  • Corrupted macOS installation
  • Corrupted partition maps
  • failing hard drive
  • logic board issue
  • GPU issue
  • and more

However, your last bullet point offers a bit of hope that it may be your SATA cable (common problem with this vintage MacBook Pro)

Putting the HDD in the enclosure and boot it from there(which works but is extremely slow and I still don't know what to do afterwards)

This means that the operating system and things being loaded isn’t crashing the system. What you’ve taken out of the equation is the everything between your drive and your logic board (the same drive works via USB) which is the SATA cable.

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  • Thanks for the reply @Allan, weirdly enough when I erased the installed ssd and tried to install the version of OSX that my mac came with (El capitan), it got through the installation and is working right now, however whenever I try to upgrade to Catalina, the same issue persists. The installation file is downloaded and the macbook reboots, but when the installation begins it keeps rebooting. Any further suggestions?
    – Mubashir Soomro
    Aug 21, 2020 at 19:08
  • Let's not compare/contrast different operating systems. At this point, I would start with a nice clean installation of something - be it El Capitan or Catalina, or whatever in between. Start there, if you have issues, we address those - but switching operating systems and drives and how those drives are interfaced in almost random fashion isn't going to narrow things down.
    – Allan
    Aug 21, 2020 at 19:57
  • Alright, I put aside my hdd and installed the ssd, completely wiped it out, using internet recovery I did a clean install of El Capitan. It is working good so far, just to be sure I applied the updates that were available from the app store, some app updates and a security patch, and it is working great so far. I have downloaded Catalina and it appears that whenever it reboots to install it, and the progress bar appears it reboots again and so on. Therefore I did a clean install of El Capitan again and haven't touched anything so far.
    – Mubashir Soomro
    Aug 21, 2020 at 20:04

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