Replacing a MacBook Air SSD
Sunday, June 23rd, 2024
So I have an early 2014 MacBook Air (13", 256GB, 4GB) & my parents originally got it back in either 2014 or 2015, and it has never been taken for maintenance, and to be honest, it has worked fine until last year (end of 2023), where this year, we powered it on & for some reason it just didn't boot. I knew that there was something wrong with the SSD because if I left it for a few minutes, the black screen would go away and it would show the folder with the sad face, indicating that it cannot boot to anything. I originally left it because I wasn't bothered, but recently I realised how awful my current Windows laptop is (even once I had installed Linux Mint onto it), so I ended up deciding that I was going to try to fix this MacBook Air.
I have (pretty much) just finished my 2 weeks of work experience, and I was given £50 (surprisingly, the employers/companies weren't actually meant to pay us), so I decided I was going to chance that money (that I didn't even know I would get) into fixing this MacBook. So I went onto Amazon and ordered the items in the screenshot. Some screwdrivers (MacBook specific ones were required), an SSD adapter (what caused all of this, I think), a Screen cleaner (because there was dust and lots of stuff all over the screen that made it look horrible), and the SSD itself.
So the SSD was actually used, a Corsair, 480GB, 2,000MB/s SSD to be specific. I was a bit nervous getting a used one, since this MacBook had (I assume) died due to heavy use of the SSD over all the years, but Corsair is a reliable company and this SSD seems newer.
So finally, the different parts arrived. The SSD adapter (in that clearish packet), the SSD (in that black box), and the separate screwdrivers.
I took off the back using iFixit's guide, which was extremely easy, there are 10 screws in total, 8 of which are the exact same. After this, is when things got a bit harder. According to iFixit, I had to gently pull the battery tab backwards to make it come out, so I did, but it ended up falling off, and I am pretty sure it wasn't even my fault, I guess it just happened after all those years of just being untouched.
Luckily, this seemed to be ok, and I was able to wiggle out the battery connector, and at the moment, it still works fine.
After this, I had to remove the old SSD, which ended up being extremely easy, and I still have it on the floor of my room whilst I am typing this, not sure where I will put it lol. But, coming around to installing the new SSD was much more of a challenge. The actual SSD, with the adapter underneath, ended up being pretty thick (as you can imagine), and so with what was already an extremely thin screw, I wasn't able to fit it in.
I kept trying and trying to fit it in like that, but it kept not working, so I resorted to just cutting the actual adapter off, since it was only some plastic beyond the actual connector part. This got it to sit nicely with the SSD on top, and I was finally able to actually screw it down.
After this, surely it's just as easy as plugging back in the battery connector and screwing back on the back plate, right? Well I thought that too. I already had an external SSD with the macOS Big Sur Installer on it, ready to plug it in and install Big Sur, however they had other plans. I turned it on and it seemed to be going well, previously it took minutes to allow me to get to the macOS Installer, but now it automatically did it in under a minute, so at least I now know it was an SSD issue, and nothing more serious. I got to the Disk Utility in the Big Sur installer, and, of course, with my luck it didn't read the SSD.
I'm not entirely sure why there is a macOS Base System (1.79GB), I assume it's a backup/recovery partition that isn't built into the SSD so that they can do stuff like this incase they need to fix a Mac? Reach out to me if you know what it's for.
So, by this point, I wasn't sure what to do, so I ended up opening the back up again, and redoing the previous steps of removing the back, unplugging the battery, removing the SSD and putting it back in. Once it was time again, I tried, and nope, still didn't work. This was really starting to annoy me, so I tried to boot from a SanDisk USB stick which I have Ventoy installed on, in the hopes that ANY Linux distro could help me.
As you can see, I only had a few already on here, such as FerenOS, Linux Mint, Manjaro (KDE), & ZorinOS (aswell as Windows 11, but we talk about that in a bit).
For whatever reason, each Linux distribution said this (Not a Secure Boot Platform 14) when I tried to boot to it from Ventoy. Not sure why, but clearly it's something with more modern Linux versions and maybe this older Mac hardware?
Windows 11 also did this when I tried to boot in wimboot mode, so that wasn't an option anymore.
Now I'm here, on my Windows laptop, downloading the Windows 10 iso from Microsoft's website. I was hoping that I could boot into the Windows 10 installer, then reformat the newly installed SSD.
Eventually this downloaded and I put the .iso file onto the SSD which had the Big Sur installer on it. So I plugged that back into the MacBook, booted from it and it all seemed ok...
So I was booting from the external SSD which had the Windows 10 iso on it, and it eventually got to the "Setup is starting" page, so I let that load out. Eventually, once I got through the initial setup process, I was at the point where I can choose the drive to install the OS to, and this is when I got the sudden shock (again) that I couldn't install it..
I knew this was up to the adapter, because the SSD was warm when I took off the back, so it was clearly getting power from somewhere, just it couldn't read it. I could see the pins on it are fine, and this specific adapter had some dodgy reviews on Amazon, which I didn't see until today, the day I personally have issues with it.
So, with the help of Aridan, I ordered a new adapter which is more reputable, and should hopefully get this old Mac back up and running.
Not entirely sure why I wrote this whole blog post out at 1am, but I never sleep well anyways and I thought it'd be interesting to document what was happening.
If you don't want to read all of this, I do have a mini Bluesky thread which you can read below.
