Chosen Solution
I am replacing the hard drive in my macbook air because the old one failed. I have installed the new drive but OS X Utilities can’t see the new drive because I think the firmware needs to be updated. An instruction in the new hard drive package says: “Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra (or later macOS) must be installed on the host computer before installing the Aura Pro X SSD. These versions included an EFI firmware update for your host computer. Without this update, your new Aura X Pro will not cunction once installed.” How do I update this so the computer can see the new drive? The old drive did not work so I am not sure how that would be an option.
How about leveraging Internet recovery! Then you can install the older OS onto the drive first so you can then update the firmware Or download the OS installer and then install the older OS onto a USB thumb drive to then run the firmware updater and Disk Utility to prep the drive. How to reinstall macOS using either Command (⌘)-R or Shift-Option-Command-R. To prep a USB Thumb drive follow this guide: How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive Keep in mind High Sierra will upgrade the GUID Journaled file system to the newer GUID APFS. If you don’t want that you’ll need to install Sierra and stay with it. Or edit the OS installer script How to Skip Converting to APFS When Installing macOS High Sierra
I’ve figured a workaround. I hope this helps everyone who had the same problem as me with a broken original SSD in the MacBook. What I used is another MacBook and an external SSD. Connect the external SSD to the second macbook. Download the full Catalina installer from Apple. Double click and select the SSD as drive. Press install and wait until the macbook restarts. Hold the alt button and boot in original drive. When booted disconnect the SSD. Connect the SSD to your macbook you wish to upgrade the firmware. Hold alt and let it boot on the SSD. The install will fail at the end but that is ok. Shut the macbook down, connect your new internal SSD and boot. Start internet recovery and guess what: your new SSD works!
I had the same problem and analysed it deeply. The problem is that Macbook has too old firmware to boot from the OWC drive. If you run High Sierra or above (installer or installed system on external disk or recovery image), it will recognise the disk correctly. Upgrading firmware on Macbook however, required that it is first installed on the internal drive on a special EFI partition, and then system reboots, and it upgrades firmware during boot. Of course it will not upgrade the firmware, because after reboot it will not see the internal drive. So this is a chicken-egg problem. The solution is to install original Apple internal drive (or another drive that works with old firmware) and to update firmware either by installing High Sierra or newer OS or manually using “bless” command. Then the Apple drive can be removed and OWC drive installed and it should work fine. OWC claims it has a drive rental service, but I haven’t checked it. I bought a 128GB used Apple drive for the firmware upgrade.
