2011 iMac 21.5 SSD upgrade gone wrong

[Audentia]

Ok internets, I need help.
Recently picked up a used imac and was pretty happy with it except couldn't stand going back to traditional hard drive after being used to SSD on my custom built hackintosh and MacBook Air.

So got crucial m550 and 3.5in bracket, looked at all the guides and cracked it open and installed the SSD where the stock hard drive went. I'm not interested in having both at same time or removing logic board.

Put back together, turned her on and everything was fine. Went into recovery mode and used time machine to restore from my external USB drive onto the SSD. Everything going well, so I went to bed as it was going to take 3 hours or so. (Fans started doing the full speed thing as it was transferring data.)

Woke up this morning to find it had "failed restoring". After clicking ok and trying again now recovery mode doesn't even see the SSD. Rebooted and no more apple sound, won't even boot to recovery mode, it's just sorta in a grey screen loop where it says something was wrongs with your computer, press a key to boot, then after a hike black text goes over grey screeen saying something went wrong.

Any suggestions welcome

 

[Audentia]

Update

After pulling power cable and rebooting I got into recovery mode and the crucial SSD shows up again. Decided I would just install osx and then use migration tool this time. So went to format SSD to remove partial tm recovery files and it fails, saying unable to unmount the disk. Is the SSD faulty? Or something else?

 

[crjackson2134]

Put your REMOVED HDD into an external enclosure and boot from that. After booted you can attempt a repair/install of the internal SSD. I think I would have installed the OS to the SSD from an enclosure and tested before doing the teardown. I've never had an iMac so I'm not sure how difficult it was, but is sounds like it may be troublesome.

 

[Audentia]

Again

Ok another reboot and this time trying my mavericks USB key boot into that, I reformatted drive, and am installing osx. Hopefully these are just weird flukes and not hw problem...

----------

That's true, probably shoulda thought of installing it in enclosure first.

 

[crjackson2134]

Ok another reboot and this time trying my mavericks USB key boot into that, I reformatted drive, and am installing osx. Hopefully these are just weird flukes and not hw problem...

----------

That's true, probably shoulda thought of installing it in enclosure first.

Hopefully it was just a glitch. Could have even been a problem with your TM backup. Did you format/partition the SSD before attempting to restore from TM?

 

[Audentia]

Good progress

Hey, yeah I had initially formatted it as mac os extended and GUID, the usual. Then I ran the restore from TM. I noticed it seems the first thing it did was reformat anyways and rename partition same as what previously was (Macintosh HD, i had changed it to Macintosh SSD for fun), which makes sense when i think about it.

Anyways, after installing OSX from the usb drive, then just using migration assistant everything seems peachy. Ive used the computer all day now and it works great. Getting about 480read and 510 write, pretty close to the theoretical 500/550. Installed TRIM enabler, re updated to 10.9.3 and all is well.