Chosen Solution
I’ve purchased and installed ifixit’s SSD replacement kit for my MacBook, and have placed my old HD in the external enclosure. When I successfully started the new SSD up in recovery mode and selected the option to recovery from external drive, it doesn’t recognize my old HD at all. Am I doing something wrong??
“Am I doing something wrong??” Not likely! What is happening is the OS you installed is the older HFS+ version on your SSD (Sierra or older) where as you have been aggressive upgrading your HDD OS to Mojave or newer which uses APFS! So what’s happening here is the OLDER OS running on your system now can’t decipher your older drives data! So you’ll need to upgrade your SSD’s OS to Mojave at least! How to get old versions of macOS Now the other shoe falls! The older SATA based systems really should stick with HFS+ file system as APFS is very chatty. You can encounter performance issues as well as stability issues if you press your system hard.
