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Hello, I have a Late 2011 MBP 13" and recently my Hard Drive stopped being recognized. So i took the cover off removed the drive installed it in an external enclosure and it worked. So i read here to install some tape above the SATA connector ribbon and i did but still didnt fix the problem. I also ordered the HD ribbon cable replacement and installed it and still no luck the laptop still doesnt recognize the HDD, i even tried ordering another cable hoping it was just a bad ribbon but still no luck. So i bought a 2nd HDD optical drive enclosure and figured i dont use the optical drive ill just replace it with a hard drive and boot from there. I bought a new SSD HD, installed OSX El Capitan on it with my iMac using an external USB enclosure, installed the new SSD into the optical drive bay and connected/installed everything back on thr MBP and booted the laptop. When booted i get a flashing gray circle with a line through it, then it alters to the flashing question mark folder. I can press option while bootup and it recognizes the SSD but doesnt want to boot from it. What am i doing wrong? Is it possible to bootup the OS from the optical drive bay with a SSD? The new SSD is a PNY CS1311 i also booted the SSD from an external USB enclosure and verified the drive/OS were both working. Please help.
So the issue your having is probably a corrupt install. Try installing the OS from a usb stick and install it to the ssd in the optical drive enclosure. http://www.macworld.com/article/2981585/… That will show you the proper way to make a Bootable USB. After youve done that, use it to install EL Cap on the ODD enclousure.
Lets give this a try put the drive back into the system using the HD bay or optical drive bay. Now this time when you start your system press and hold the Option key to get to the Boot manager. From there using the arrow keys to select your SSD drive to boot your system. You should now be booting up via your SSD. At this point you’ll need to go to the Startup Disk preferences to then alter the setting so the SSD is your default boot drive.
