Chosen Solution
Finally bought a replacement logic board for my dead 2014 MBP, and it should be coming within the next week or so. It’s a bit of an upgrade, previously I had a 2.8ghz i5 w/ 8gb ram, and the new one will have 3.0ghz i7 w/ 16gb ram, so its not a straight replacement. I still have my SSD in good working order. Do I need to do anything to it, such as a clean boot, some sort of initializing, or any reformatting to it before my computer will fully work again? I had thought that I could simply pop it into the slot, close it up, turn it on, and go, but I’ve learned that things are rarely that easy. I believe it was running el capitan but I can’t quite remember. Should I upgrade to mojave once I get it running? Thanks!
With MacOS, that generally does work and you don’t need to mess with anything. That being said, there’s usually some performance issue that practically forces you to wipe the machine and restart if things are too different. I don’t think you’ll have any in your case since you’re upgrading to the i7/16GB motherboard. See if you can boot it up as-is and figure out if you have any crippling performance issues - if you do not, run it on the old installation. If you do, backup your files and start over from scratch.
No magic here! If you got the correct board for your system, just follow the guide MacBook Pro 13" Retina Display Mid 2014 Logic Board Replacement. As far as swapping over the SSD again nothing special mechanically. You might encounter an issue with the systems firmware depending on what the board has already. I would encourage you to prep up a bootable OS installer USB thumb drive before starting just in case. For starters you shouldn’t need to upgrade. Here’s the possible startup screens you might encounter About the screens your Mac displays as it starts up if you encounter any let us know. Going to Mojave might break some of your current programs so you might want to make sure you’ve updated them and see if there are alternative apps if it doesn’t support Mojave. How to make a bootable OS X 10.11 El Capitan installer driveHow to create a bootable macOS Mojave installer drive
