My 2012 MacBook Pro lives on, despite coming close to what appeared to its final demise at the weekend.

I gave the MacBook to my wife a couple of years ago and she’s loved using it – but before I did, I’d replaced the battery and the hard drive. But, at the weekend, the diagnosis didn’t look good.

When you tried to switch it on, it simply showed a folder with a question mark inside it…

I headed int0 MacOS Recovery (Command & R during boot) and could see that there was no book disk. In Disk Utility it showed the internal drive but without its usual name and it was un-mounted (and no way to mount it). A repair reported no problem.

Anyway, it just happens that I still have the original drive, in a USB-C external drive enclosure. So, I took it out of the enclose and swapped them over. Unfortunately, I had the exact same issue. Putting the drive, previously from the MacBook, into the enclosure, I could connect it to my work MacBook and read it perfectly. So, it wasn’t the drive.

I put everything back to how it was, checked all connections and gave everything a good clean. But, still nothing.

Finally, I read on a site that it may – may – be the drive’s flex cable. Amazon sell them for just £13.99, so I thought it was worth a try.

The cable isn’t just for the hard drive but also the IR port at the front of the laptop, including the IR itself. Sadly, taking the old one out I damaged the IR connector so I really didn’t need to replace it now!

The new cable needs to be stuck down under the hard drive (tape is on it by default but you really have one chance to get it right).

And…

It worked! It booted beautifully first time.

I put all the many, many screws back, gave it a clean and handed it back to my wife (who, by this time, was enjoying the aged Chromebook I’d lent her in the meantime!).

Why Trigger’s Brook? For those who don’t know…

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