MBP 2008 SSD Drive upgrade question

[Buckaye]

Hi All,

I bought a used MBP - late 2008 ver. yesterday (which I hear is not really a MBP but just a MB) - and on the way home I picked up a samsung SSD drive 120GB

It's running an up to date version of Mountain Lion

I tried copying the current HDD using the restore function (apple command + R mode) and it appeared to copy everything.

However, when I swapped the drives - it wouldn't boot. Got to the grey screen, but no apple came up.

Soooo I am wondering what to try next?

1. try using CCC instead? I heard/read that is the preferred method
2. Do I need to do anything about the sudden movement sensor? Could not making solid contact with that cause the drive not to boot? It looks like the previous owner had some issue with the sensor or something because he had jammed some cardboard between the HDD and the case to keep it from jiggling at all.
3. I realized I didn't detach the battery from the main logic board before I switched out the drive - could that be the problem?
4. anything else I am missing?

I am getting an optical drive caddy to use for the HDD once I have sucessfully switched over to SSD. (The optical drive on this thing is hosed anyway... keep ejecting disks without reading them).

Thanks in advance for the help

 

[Buckaye]

knock knock knock... is this thing on? Knock knock knock....

 

[Weaselboy]

It sounds like you did everything okay up to the point of installing the OS. The command-r boot won't work because that uses the recovery partition off the drive, and your drive is blank.

At this point you should just get a cheap USB SATA enclosure (something like this) and put the old drive in the enclosure. Then option key boot to the old drive. Now install the free trial version of Carbon Copy Cloner and use it to clone to old drive to the new one.

Then shutdown and disconnect the external. Now start off the internal SSD and go to System Prefs Startup Disk pane and select the new SSD as the boot drive.

That should fix you up.

 

[Buckaye]

Thanks! I redid the clone with ccc (before I saw this actually) and then put the old HHD in the optical drive slot... it's all working now and is AWESOME! Seriously... what other kind of machine could be made this slick 5 years after it was built???

 

[Doward]

A little late, but it may help someone in the future: