Re-installing OS X after SSD upgrade

hatfullofjim said:

hey guys
i know this has probably been answered previously.

i'm looking to purchase an OWC ssd for my mid 2011 11 inch air

i just need to know the simplest way to get OS X back up and running after the ssd is swapped over

i did find something called lion diskmaker, is that any good?



even a link to the previously answered thread would be fantastic

thank you

Click to expand...

When you buy your OWC SSD, get the extra item called the Envoy. That will house your old SSD and allow you to boot again and then clone back to your new SSD. If you don't want to keep your old SSD, then don't bother with the Envoy, but you will need to clone the old SSD to a USB drive of at least 32GB. Then use this to boot and re-clone back to the new SSD.

See my #24 post here : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1579134/

Weaselboy said:

if you just want to get the OS back on there and you are not concerned about copying data over from the old drive, you can just command-r boot once the new drive is in and that will start Internet recovery. Once the recovery screen comes up use Disk Util to format the new drive to Mac OS Extended then quit Disk Util and click install OS.

Click to expand...

I did this for my new Samsung 840 in my new Mini. Didn't work. Maybe I did something wrong or maybe it was due to there being nothing at all on the new drive. Is Command -r working from the Recovery Partition or from system ROM ? If the latter, then it should have worked for me.

Weaselboy said:

It partly works from the latter. If you command-r with a blank drive the system rolls over into Internet recovery. There is a small stub in the firmware that connects to Apple's servers to DL the recovery system (only the stub and not the entire recovery HD exist in firmware). Once the recovery system is downloaded it starts and looks just like the regular recovery from the recovery partition.

The one snag I have seen people have with this is it will not work with the old WEP wifi encryption, it needs to be WPA or open wifi.

This only works with 2010+ machines. What model/year is your Mini?

Click to expand...

Brand new model, so built a month or so ago to the late 2012 spec. Maybe it was because I was using a non Apple keyboard so it didn't get the right start up commands.

hatfullofjim said:

hey guys
i know this has probably been answered previously.

i'm looking to purchase an OWC ssd for my mid 2011 11 inch air

i just need to know the simplest way to get OS X back up and running after the ssd is swapped over

i did find something called lion diskmaker, is that any good?



even a link to the previously answered thread would be fantastic

thank you

Click to expand...

Clone your old disk to an external USB disk first (the size should be big enough to hold your occupied portion of your disk). However since ML does not allow you to clone the partition you booted from using the Disk Utility, you need to boot from the recovery partition (hold the alt key as you boot) and do it from the Disk Utility there. Use the "Restore" option.

Check to make sure that you cloned the recovery partition as well. If you hold the "alt" key while you are booting after the cloning, you should see two recovery partitions now; one on the internal disk and the other one on the cloned USB disk.

Once you have cloned your old disk, replace the internal drive with the OWC drive. Connect the external USB clone and boot it from the recovery partition of the external USB drive. Go to the Disk utility again and repeat the cloning again using Restore, but this time from the USB drive to the newly installed internal drive.

You can also use CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) for cloning. The advantage CCC has over the Disk Utility is that it allows you to clone the partition you booted from.

The above method will allow you to continue from where you left before the disk swap. However, if you just want to install the OS X, then boot from the recovery partition of your cloned USB and after that just choose the Re-Install OS X option. That way you will will end up with a machine as it came from the Apple store.

Weaselboy said:

Should definitely work with your machine. I think the "Windows" key on a PC KB is the same as the command key on an Apple KB, so maybe that would work.

Click to expand...

So - operator error then, ha. Still, it worked in the end using the old drive to boot from with a SATA-USB lead.