New Hard Drive Install Problem-HDD Not Recognized

[deeve]

I am replacing the HDD in my mid 2009 MacBook Pro 13" with a new unit. The old one is fine, just full. The old HDD is a 160GB 5400RPM unit. The new one is a WD Black 500GB 7200. I installed 10.8.3 on the drive with it connected via USB and the Command R command. I was able to boot to the new drive (with the old one installed) with the Option held while booting and it connected via USB. I checked, repaired and verified the new disk and it was all 'OK.' When I install the new drive into the bay and restart I get the Folder with ? mark. I must be missing something simple?

Thinking it was the SATA ribbon, which I had replaced last fall, I swapped the drives back in. The old drive works fine. Multiple swaps results in the same. New gets the folder with ? Old boots up great.

DAVE

 

[Limey77]

Have you tried rebooting holding down option and then selecting the new drive? Once it boots make sure to id the new drive as the start up drive.

 

[deeve]

It does not appear when I do that. I am thinking something might have gotten messed up during the install of the OS. I booted to the Recovery Partition with the original HDD connected via USB and the new installed HDD was not recognized. Disk Utilities showed it was formatted incorrectly or otherwise screwy, so I am doing an install of the OS with physically in the drive bay. We will see how that goes.

 

[deeve]

An update to help someone else maybe. For whatever reason, installing the OS with the new HDD attached via USB did not intall correctly. I ended up reversing things and installing the new drive in the bay and connecting the old one via USB enclosure. I then booted to the recovery partition on the old drive then formatted and reinstalled OSX on the new drive that way. After about an hour everything was switched over and running great!

DAVE