My youngest son's long suffering 2013 A1205 Intel MacBook Pro 11,1 was working quite nicely (albeit slowly) - running Ventura 13.6.4 thanks to OCLP. However, a recent software update appears to have killed it - it hangs when booting about a third of the way along the nominal 'progress' bar. 

OCLP was version 1.0 and update was to 1.3.0.

There is a 1Tb SSD in the machine. Weirdly, the Disk Utility identifies there to be 500GB on the drive so there must be another 'hidden' partition in there, which I am unable to access by the usual means (short or option on boot). It won't boot into safe mode. 

I have an external USB with OCLP 1.3.0 installer on, with the 11,1 model selected in the build. I can see this on boot and select it as an EFI boot option (as well as the pre-existing EFI boot on the internal SSD and a Macintosh HD partition - none of these boot up). 

If I select the USB installer, the next screen has only one drive option to boot from - and this hangs at exactly the same place every time. In verbose boot mode, the last comment is "disk1s6 volume update role is not a system or data volume" or pretty close to that. 

I can't use Internet Recovery as that's an older version of OSX. 

I wonder if I need to create an external bootable MacOS drive and then somehow use that to wipe the internal SSD back to a single 1TB volume and then copy the external drive on to the SSD?

Anyone out there with ninja skills in OCLP? What am I doing wrong (other than tinkering with stuff I clearly don't really understand?). 

Many thanks in advance

Ben