Chosen Solution
This is a continuation from my previous question: SSD Upgrade on Mid 2013 MacBook Air Not Working The original Apple SSD is toast. So we need a replacement; no idea what OS it was running beforehand. Have tried a replacement NVME drive and adapter with a USB High Sierra installer but the installer would always fail and restart. (As stated in previous question) I have now bought an NVME drive and adapter with High Sierra preinstalled, but it cannot boot into it. I have tried booting into into internet recovery mode, but it refuses to accept my wifi password. Ironically, I was able to get into recovery mode a few days prior, but that was when I only had the NVME plus adapter plugged in and nothing was shown in disk utility. I have now plugged an external drive into the other USB port and installed the original OS Mavericks from a USB installer (it may have been mountain lion, but that shouldn’t matter) on the external drive. While in Mavericks on the external, I tried connecting to the internet, every time it says connection timed out when verifying password. I connected to a different slower network finally. I tried updating it to High Sierra, and got an error message about a firmware problem. I then read online about firmware problems, and it said I need the OEM SSD inside it to perform the update. As the original one is toast, I took an Apple SSD out of my 2015 MacBook Air (should still work, this is a 2013) and tried installing Mavericks there. The Apple SSD doesn’t even appear, I thought this was because it was still APFS, so I booted into the High Sierra installer and formatted the drive as Journaled and restarted. It STILL wouldn’t appear in Mavericks Disk Utility. I am at a loss. I have already ran ASD and it found NO problems. Upon booting while holding the d key (with the toasted drive in it, and with the new name drive and adapter) it only says that something may be wrong with the storage device. I know that all Mac’s undergo a necessary firmware update for the new APFS protocol when upgrading to High Sierra, but how can I possibly do it??
press cmd with space then type terminal to open terminal Type sudo diskutil verifyDisk disk0 enter password if asked Type sudo diskutil repairdisk disk0 type y to start disk repair Install High Sierra!
I partitioned using AFPS and it let it install on the usb stick. I tried using the other journaled one and it brought up the partition message firmware. Hope it helps.
Had to install an Apple SSD and manually update to High Sierra. Then I could use the nvme drive and adapter.
