Episode: 4173
Title: HPR4173: Getting my 2015 Macbook Pro back up and running
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4173/hpr4173.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:42:15

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4173 for Wednesday the 31st of July 2024.
Today's show is entitled Getting My 2015 MacBook Pro Backup and Running.
It is hosted by Swift 110 and is about 6 minutes long. It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, the storage drive of my 2015 MacBook Pro died on me and I was able to replace
it.
Hello, this is Swift 110 and very recently I came back to my hotel room. I had been out
of town for a few days and my laptop had a screen on it that I had never seen before.
It showed a folder on the inside of the question mark. My first instinct was to obviously
turn the laptop off and turn it back on. But that got the same error message on the screen.
I tried that a couple more times to know if it will avail and decided to actually look
up the problem. The problem was with my 15 inch 2015 MacBook Pro. Apparently the SSD had
gone belly up. I'm not going to say a few words or not going to give a moment of silence
because none has needed. The thing went belly up. And so doing some research, clicking
on the actual error message going into Apple, but not came to the conclusion that, okay,
chances are my data is gone. I can do a couple things, try to restore the data back or
it's gone. If indeed the data is gone, I'm going to just have to start over. Well, eventually
after a lot of drama, they'll probably go into in a future recording. I ordered a brand
new SSD. Now, the thing about MacBook Pro is that Apple likes to think different. And
that means they don't just put any old SSD in their machines. See, it has to be a PCIe
SSD. And so, it means I need a more specialized type of drive to even run a machine at
all. A couple of case matters, right? Can't just go to Microsoft and pick up a drive, pop
it in, drop it down. I'll be able to do that with Windows. I'll be able to do that with
Linux, but not Apple. Because they think different. Okay. So I go to Amazon and I order
a new PCIe SSD drive that I would need. Well, not a problem, not really after all. I would
decide to replace the old drive, which was a 256 gigabyte drive, with a 512. The other
storage is something new. Let's rebuild this machine. Much of my surprise in the light,
I got my drive the following day. I had gone through a lot trying to create a boot USB
drive that turned out to be an epic fail. It turned out to be unnecessary. Now, when I
did get the drive, what actually ended up happening was that I didn't realize I need
the format at first. Once I got all I'd done, I was able to go ahead and install Montaway
onto it. And after quite some time, I was able to be booted up to a regular desktop. Again,
Apple likes to think different. It complicates something that should not be complicated at all.
Had I been using Linux at this particular time, I would have simply used one of my
Ventory sticks, which is a need of using multiple ISO images onto a USB drive, which means
multiple distros on one drive, pick one and install boom. 20, 30 minutes, I'm done. Start
installing programs, start rebuilding, and I'm done. And I liked that with Apple. I was
able to, thankfully, find the internet, yay, to install Montaway back to one here. And I'm
grateful to have gotten my machine back up and running. Been about a week now that I've
had it up and running. But it would have been a lot easier if Apple didn't decide to think
different. And so I thought I'd go ahead and share that short summary of getting my machines
back up and running. It's 2015 MacBook Pro. It's a nice machine. And I'll be talking more
about it in the future. Again, this has been Swift410. And I want to encourage all of you wonderful
people out there. If you've ever looked all the way to recording, perhaps you'll have a great
deal to please do so. We would love to have your submissions, to help keep this amazing
project. It's been going on for nearly 20 years. Let's keep this alive. All right, you guys have a
fantastic evening. Bye for now. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public
Radio.org. Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought
of recording podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
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and our sims.net. On the satellite status, today's show is released under Creative Commons
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