
Sometimes this will work, but other times it may only give you Mountain Lion as well (I wish Apple would fix these things so they work as intended). If macOS 10.12+ was ever previously installed on this laptop and you want Catalina, then try booting into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R.
#Upgrade macbook pro hard drive to ssd 2012 install
You should be able to install Mountain Lion and upgrade from there.

You can find links to other versions of macOS in this Apple article: Maybe if you already had High Sierra or Mojave installed it wouldn't need to run the firmware updater with those versions of macOS. The missing firmware partition error is because macOS needs to have a working internal drive for the system firmware updater. If you were running High Sierra or Mojave, then you could try to see if they will install for you. You should be able to at least install macOS 10.11 El Capitan as it did not include a system firmware updater in the installer IIRC. A Crucial MX500 works, an OWC SSD, and Samsung SSDs have been used by many. Any standard 2.5" SATA SSD should work just stay away from the cheap ones as they can be as slow as a hard drive (Crucial BX500 is one, Kingston is another). You can get a replacement cable from OWC. Other times it wouldn't even power on an SSD. I've had some where I could write to the drive during an OS install, but as soon as I would boot to the drive it would fail. The symptoms of a defective cable vary greatly.
