[Synthx]

Back in 2018 shortly after my 18th birthday, I bought a 13-inch, mid 2012 Macbook Pro from one of my best friends for only $150. If I remember correctly, it was running Mac OS X Lion. The first thing I jumped to was Messages because I still didn't have my phone at the time and I really wanted to know if I could iMessage, it actually worked. As I started to use it more and more, I very quickly realized that MANY programs we all use on a daily basis were not supported, which was to be expected. After getting fed up with it, I asked @phyrrus9 how well High Sierra would run on it and with the stock specs that it had, he said it was going to run slow as hell. I bit the bullet and updated to High Sierra because I was sick of trying to find programs that were supported. It actually ran pretty decent. There was a 500 GB hard drive in it that wasn't the best. I ran this thing well for about a year. During this year I had dual booted Kali on the same hard drive. Well, I ended up wanting to update to Mojave but since Kali uses a GRUB loader, I had to hold option upon boot in order to boot into Mac and during the update I got called away for a moment and the laptop restarted and booted into Linux. Long story short, I screwed up that hard drive by trying to forcefully remove the partition with Kali on it and it screwed up and couldn't even boot into Mac but the files were still there. So, I found a 1 TB hard drive in another laptop I had and installed it in my Mac. That is what started my interest in restoring my Mac and making it run like it's a modern computer.

Since then, I bought a hard drive caddy from Amazon for just $14 to replace the CD Drive and add an extra hard drive which I added the old 500 GB hard drive. I also have added an 8GB Memory stick along with a 4GB stick. When I get the money I will be replacing the 4GB with a 8GB. I also really need to get a new battery for this thing because this piece of shit can't even last me 4 hours on Mac OS and about 2 hours on Parrot OS which I have installed on the 500GB Hard Drive.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? I would really love to know of anyone else who still uses a older Macbook in 2019. This thing runs amazing now that I have been upgrading it and stuff.

[phyrrus9]

Not entirely sure what your issue here is. Do you care to recover the data, or do you just want to bring it back to normal?

If you just want to bring it back to normal, you can do network restore. This assumes that you didn't overwrite the factory EFI state (it is possible, and you won't get it back).

1. plug it into an ethernet connection
2. hold down Command-Option-R and press the Power button
3. use the normal reinstall options from there.

I can tell you though that your problem is that you used grub directly. You needed to use something like http://refit.sourceforge.net/. This tricks the stock loader into believing that the linux partition is actually a windows/bootcamp partition, and you install grub directly on that partition (with blockloader).

EDIT:

you can also make a bootable recovery USB drive by running

Code:

PATH=/Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app sudo ${PATH}/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath "$PATH" --nointeraction

replace with whatever the path to the installer application is.

[Synthx]

Not entirely sure what your issue here is. Do you care to recover the data, or do you just want to bring it back to normal?

It's not really an issue, I was able to restore all the files I had, I just used a USB Sata connector to pull all the files off. I was already looking to get a new hard drive. I was just wondering if anyone else has restored their old Macbook Pro.