Booting with a fresh SSD?

Hey all,

I've tried searching and either what I want to know is t addressed anywhere, or I don't know the terms, so sorry if this is answered somewhere.

I got a "broken" 2015 MacBook pro from a co-worker. I had zero Mac experience but thought I'd take a crack at fixing it. I was able to narrow it down to the HDD (boots up to question mark folder). It also seems to have a firmware password as I get the password prompt for it when I try to boot into recovery, boot options, or anything else.

I got an adapter to connect the SSD to my desktop and tried loading a recovery image on the SSD with transmac, and tried putting a Windows installation on it, both resulting in the question mark folder.

My question - is there any way to get it to boot up anything without the firmware password? I'd take Mac, windows, or Linux.