Where is the SSD on My Disk Utility?

General
1

I have a MacBook Pro Retina 13" (Late 2013, A1502) that originally had a 128GB SSD. I upgraded to a Crucial P3 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD with an adapter.

The new SSD works fine as an external drive in an enclosure (formatted ExFAT and later Mac OS Extended, GUID).

When installed internally, the Mac only boots into Recovery Mode, but Disk Utility doesn’t detect the SSD.

Tried a different adapter and even checked with Terminal (diskutil list) — still nothing.

So, the SSD works externally but isn’t recognized internally by the Mac. Looking for solutions.

2

Your MacBook Pro (Late 2013) doesn’t natively support NVMe boot drives. Apple only added NVMe boot support starting with macOS High Sierra (10.13) and later firmware updates. Make sure you’ve updated your Mac’s firmware to the latest version by installing High Sierra or newer on the original Apple SSD first. After that, the system should recognize NVMe drives internally.

3

If the SSD shows up externally but not internally, it’s almost always either:

(1) Mac firmware too old (update needed).

(2) SSD not fully compatible.

(3) Adapter issue.

Check each one in that order. If all fail, you’d better rescue your data ASAP. iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is a good choice.

4

Here are some solutions you can take:

How to Fix an External SSD That is Not Recognized on Mac?
Hard Drives Not Showing up or Working?