Installing a SSD and Fresh Mountain Lion install?

I did exactly what you described yesterday after my new crucial v4 256gb drive arrived through the post. As long as you make the lion usb drive correctly it should work

What you're probably getting confused with is that mountain lion creates a recovery partition on your storage drive as a replacement to using a DVD/CD if you need to boot for any recovery action such as a reinstall or time machine restore. Obviously without that recovery partition you can't boot from it to install mountain lion. However, the usb stick with the bootable mountain lion installer on it means you don't need the recovery partition as you have all the information you need on the memory stick.

Diligo123 said:

So basically, I need to:

Format the SSD using Disk Utility
Create a bootable USB drive of Mountain Lion
Replace the HDD with the blank/formatted SSD
Boot off the USB stick and install (fresh) Mountain Lion

Click to expand...

Yeah, thats no problem. However, you won't need to format the ssd before you install it in the machine. If you replace the HD with the SSD and then boot from the usb stick, the Mountain Lion installer comes with Disk Utility on it so you can do it then if you want. Thats what I did anyway.

Here's what I did (I too bought a Crucial M4 256GB)

I happen to have an external drive dock for 2.5/3.5" drives so I plugged my new SSD into that first while my computer was running. I initialized the SSD as prompted by the OS and then rebooted to the "Recovery HD" partition. I then selected the Reinstall Mountain Lion option and selected the SSD.

After the install was complete I instructed migration assistant to copy over my user account.

Then I did the swap after the drive was completed. I did buy the drive bay adapter from OWC so I can use my previous HDD as a secondary storage drive and I put the superdrive into an enclosure.

Or plug the SSD into a external enclosure and go through ML Recovery mode to install OS from there which I believe is easier.