I would greatly appreciate any assistance. So I said I will try and reboot the pc to see if I get the same issue, and unfortunately when I clicked restart the pc shut off and on boot the folder with the question mark popped up and it never came on again. I tested the system and everything was working excellent better than the HDD. MacOS Catalina was installed and i went through the setup and everything went well. Best performing Mac compatible SSD drive upgrades for Apple MacBook, iMac and Mac mini computers in 2022 : Crucial, Samsung, WD, OWC, and SanDisk SSDs. Then I put back the SSD in the Mac and did a fresh install of MacOS via recovery mode. I then attached the SSD externally and initialized it using disk utility to MacOS Extended Journaled (The default settings). I then took out the SSD and put back in the HDD and booted up the pc and it booted fine.

So I tried initializing it by using first aid then erasing it etc. I then noticed that disk utility said the drive was uninitialized. So I booted into recovery mode and went to disk utility. I then powered it on and a folder with a question mark popped up and it did not boot. I tested the system and it seemed to work fine so I shut it down. On boot a circle with a diagonal popped up then it booted up fine. Then i took out the HDD and put in the SSD.

I cloned the HDD onto the SSD using CC Cloner. I purchased a 500GB Samsung SSD (870 EVO) to switch the HDD with.

So I have a late 2012 Mac Mini it has a 1TB HDD (what it came with).

Samsung ssd for mac mini late 2012