The MacBook Error
We have here a Macbook backup error. When we try to do a transfer to an external drive. I am going to show you what we discovered over here today. You may be having this problem out there. We were kind of scratching our heads on this unit. A MacBook Pro. We started with changing the hard drive. We did an upgrade to the hard drive put this SSD on.
Then we cloned the operating system because we wanted to keep all his software in place. Then he wanted also to do a backup. So what was happening is when we were transferring to this backup it would fail to transfer. It would start and then I think it wouldn’t get to a couple hundred Mb. Then it would just freeze up. The error would lock down the whole computer. So it was kind of crazy the first thing we thought that the operating system was wacked and I think the operating system really wasn’t 100% anyways.
Reinstalling the OS
So we went ahead and reinstalled the operating system from scratch. The new SSD same problem. We tried to go externally, could not do it so there we are trying to think well what are the other possible causes? One option could have been bad USB ports and that’s creating a file transfer problem. We kind of excluded the USB ports by grabbing two external drives and got this one here so we used external to external to see how that transfer went and that worked fine. So there we kind of excluded the USB connections, the drives, these cables all that.
The little hard drive connector
The next possible candidate was this little guy over here. Which is the hard drive connector cable ribbon which you would think it doesn’t move. There is no moving parts. There really nothing that you would think of caused this thing to fail but with our experience here that we have had probably two to three within the last year that we have had failed. For no apparent reason its not something that gets jarred around but like everything else everything fails. One day you are going to turn on your light bulb and its not going to work and it was working perfectly yesterday. That’s how it goes on the spinning planet earth.
Switching ribbons
What we did was try another ribbon on it and low and behold that solved the problems so that’s the point of this video if you got that situation. We did some searching on YouTube, on the web we couldn’t really find anyone offering a solution. So that’s why we wanted to put this out there so that if you are having that problem transferring, locking up check your hard drive cable. Thanks for watching.
Learn about MacBook Diagnostics