Chosen Solution
I changed the hard drive on my Mid 2012 MacBook Pro to a Kingston A400 SSD. I can see the SSD in Disc Utility and also format it but the installation fails. When I clone macOS Catalina to it from my other Mac system, I can boot up the computer when the SSD is connected via USB and it works fine. But it won’t boot up from internal SATA cable. I also tried with the old HD which I also cloned from my other mac and that one works with the SATA-cable.
Give this a read: Your Hard Drive Cable Is A Ticking Time Bomb If you can tell us which model you have we can guide you the rest of the way. Update (09/19/2020) OK so now we can get into the details you’ll need a new SATA cable MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable and here’s the guide to putting it in MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Mid 2012 Hard Drive Cable Replacement As you read in the link I provided we need to do a few things to improve the cable environment adding a strip of electricians tape under it so the rough surface doesn’t wear it. We also need to be careful in the handing of the cable as a common issue is people damage it in the process of putting it in. Find an old BIC ball point pen we want to take out the ink straw (empty) as we’l use it as a forming break to curl the cable were the cable needs to bend around the corners. You don’t want to crease the cable we want a nice even radius bend no tighter than the diameter of the Ink straw. So that takes care of the cable aspect of the problem. You also have one other that has to do with the High Sierra and newer macOS’s as they now use APFS file system Vs the older HFS+. Your system may not have the required firmware update to boot up under a APFS drive. So you really need to do a proper OS update or install not using cloning at all! Frankly its a good 8 years since I used any cloning app as they are not as good as a direct copy of the files using Migration Assistant. Last point APFS is really designed for PCIe blade drives (AHCI/NVMe) not SATA drives. I would strongly recommend sticking with Sierra on your system as its just safer and better.
